The office furniture

More for completeness really...

Some items in the S&S Range are 'better' than others. Personally, I've always put these in the 'others' category.

 

SS117 A chair. This is the most usefull of the three, but it has rather peg like legs I don't like.

SS118 A bed. Not really all that bad, but very limited. It would have been a lot more useful without the sword, shield and hemet!

SS141 A shelf unit. OK, the last two weren't really that bad but this... OK, where do I start? It is mis-shapen. Deep undercuts make it very difficult to get out of the mould without using a screwdriver to prise it out. These undercuts also mean you can't paint parts of it. I'm not even sure what some of the things on the shelves are! G&B/Garrison was originally going to issue this piece with the code SS116 - it's carved on the back. In the event, it was coded but never issued.

Senior moment...

 Finished the Cataplanan/Teutonic knight unit (which I started painting in 2007!) and took it down to be gloss sprayed...

Apparently my aged brain thought it would be better to overspray them white instead...

Think I've got some remedial work to do.

A couple of griffins.

In one of my shotgun periods. I've undercoated a couple of units of Burgundians, getting round to finish some Nemidian knights in a vaguely Tuetonic Knights scheme, got some Turanian cavalry undercoated, and finished a couple of griffins for my Cataplanan army, plus there's a couple more griffins cast and ready....

I'm trying out different colour schems on these. I've never been sure how to paint things like this!

A bird's eye view seems appropriate for these!

Of the current two, I prefer the lighter brown. The grey head and inner wings were originally going to be white but it didn't look right! I think it's pretty obvious that decorating bases is not one of my strong points.

Cairn Line update

 Thought it was worth doing a separate post. 

Gilbert T Wallace actually wrote two books on the Cairn Line. I ordered his second one as well and it has arrived. The Cairn Line of Steamships and Nutical Tales Beyond Leith.

This one includes a copy of the crew list of the Cairnesk on 17th August 1951... and the author was a cadet on board. The 4th Engineer was my father, George Young... so they served together! The 3rd mate had the same surname and address as the author, so I assume he was related to the author.

A note on crews. Basically, you signed on for a voyage then were discharged at the end of it. Not sure what the current situationj is, should imagine Steven would know. So basically I assume you were unemployed until you signed on to your next ship.

I will quite happily state that, for anyone interested in tramp steamers and merchant shipping generally these are useful books. They both include a lot of background information... how many books carry the crew list and details of a tramp steamer in 1951...  I was astounded by the sheer size of the crew. It lists 70 people, though 20 of them were discharged earlier, giving a crew of about 50! 

The Cairn Line of Steamships Co. Ltd.

Specifically, the Cairnesk III - part of my family history. My dad was an engineer on board - actually, at the same time as the author of the book also worked for the Cairn Line as a Cadet! No idea if they ever met. A very useful book.

Sandra found this book while doing family history thing. Full of pictures and the history of the Line and it's ships. Well worth getting

This is the ship he served aboard as 5th and then 4th Engineer. The book mentions the ship quite a few times and even includes a plan of it. Very useful - I only had one very small photo of the Cairnesk before. There is another photo in the book showing the Cairnesk docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1953, the ship mainly going between the Tyne and Canada. Very useful having a seaman in the family at that time... the UK still had rationing...

It was also the ship he was on when he married my mother. The ship's officers presented him with a clock - it's not working any more and currently sits in a cupboard. He left the Cairnesk to join the Queensland in October 1951.

Panzers, Ogres and Fishers - more from Steven

'Here are photos of the latest addition to my WW2 German army – a platoon of Panzer IVs. They took
ages to paint, so as an antidote, I also painted up a couple of Garrison figures quite quickly.
Now that I have my magic lightbox, I don’t need to do any post-processing beyond cropping to make
the photos useable. There isn’t anything dramatically different between these and the earlier Panzer
IIIs, but I think I am making incremental improvements in technique. This is the first time I have
applied decals to a significantly uneven surface – there is a panel sticking out from the side of the
turret which didn’t make applying the numbers easy. With generous use of microsol and microset
and pushing the decals down with a cotton bud, I got there in the end. '

The platoon commander is wearing the black panzer crew uniform rather than camos. From what I
can tell, both were used. There are some quite fiddly details on the uniform such as piping (which
was pink in panzer units, apparently) and the eagle and armband on his left arm. It can also be a
challenge to make black look like black, without it looking flat or making it grey. Hope I struck the
right balance.
The close-up also shows the weathering in more detail. It can be tricky to decided how much is
enough. I scaled it back for these tanks compared to the Panzer IIIs as I felt I was beginning to overdo
it. I’m oddly pleased with the weathering on the back of the turret storage bin.

'The two Garrison figures are a sci-fi technician and a fisher commander. I see you painted the technician yourself a little while ago. Must be a great figure because it is a pure coincidence that I chose the same one. I do quite like it. It was interesting doing a lot of wet blending on the lab coat to make it white, but not a flat colour. I added a small logo in red and white on the console (it is loosely based on a Commodore 64), and since the hands were flat, I painted the knuckle details to give a more three-dimensional look.

I chose the fisher commander because I remember you once painted a HOTT army with those guys. The paint job is fine but not my best. The non-metallic metal copper helmet worked well enough. I tried to make the cloak realistic with the shades and highlights, although not completely successfully.'

Current set up state (states?)

 A number of people are currently posting about their painting set ups so I thought: Why not?

This is the painting desk.After the Christmas tidy up it's slowly getting back to 'normal'. I seem to have stopped painting the Jacklex figures I bought for now, have nearly done  the current batch of Admins and seem to be eyeing up a Burgundian army...

One end of the wargames shed is a workbench. In the corner of the workbench is a high tech spraying booth. The cardboard box does get replaced... just, not really as often as it should. Eventually it will be festooned with painted cobwebs as the spiders move in. Current occupants a couple of S&S Griffons.

The other corner of the workbench is where casting takes place.Although I could keep the casting area on the workbench it's a lot more convenient to encroach on one end of the wargames table.

I'm busy casting at the moment but way behind where I had intended to be. This lot are mostly Burgundians... Currently casting S&S, Medieval and Vikings. The Viking moulds will need sorting and upgrading...

Said wargames table often gets used for other things. At the moment I'm going through everything so it's covered in various masters (etc) I'm sorting. It's also getting piled up with moulds that I'm using or sorting... Limited myself to one photo of this lot - could easily have covered two or three. For example, the storage boxes of masters...

Talking about moulds, these are the 9" ones I can use on my Tiranti. They're stored in a steel shed I've got. The shed also stores other things... First shelf unit are moulds I've had made, coded RY. Next 3 are coded R, ones at the bottom coded G.

This lot were originally just stored in one corner of the shed. They are the 12" moulds I'm sorting that I can't cast from -I've sent half a dozen to Pete Brown so far so he cast a few of the figures that are currently not on 9" moulds, the intention is to go through and a) make it possible to cast more of the figures I've only got on 12" moulds and b) produce moulds that are a bit more organised! Incidentally, mould storage is not as haphazard as it looks. 9" moulds are packed in rough numerical order, up to 25 per shelf.Thus 0-25, then 26-50, etc.  12" moulds in 100s - 0-100 over 2 shelves, ones up to the 600s over 3 shelves. The vast majority of these don't have a Prefix code.

So near future. Catch up on posts. Got one from Steven that still needs processing for a start. Finish current casting session. I'm at least a week behind where I wanted to be. Still waiting for figures back from Pete, I assume he's a bit busy at the moment. He's got three moulds to make and six to cast figures from. I'm guessing that I'll be getting another 6-12 moulds made this year. As to armies. Do Burgundians. Do Chinese and Russian 19thC. Do... well, whatever it is I'll be distracted by next...