Current Distractions: July 2017

Summertime in the city

This summer is seeing hot and humid weather come and go so my normal terrain building binge is smaller this year, I normally use spray cans for terrain and spray outside. But in the heat I managed to hit the Iron Maiden concert at Tinley Park, with Ghost opening. An awesome show!
We had another painting challenge and even though my output this month is less, I predict a big pile of completed items next month. Here's what was accomplished this month:
I completed 6 1/600 non-combatants from PT Dockyard. They were based up like my other ships and I just used boring names like "750tn coaster" instead of coming up with actual names, more generic that way? I also tried out some soldering on the masts. I've had bad luck with pieces breaking off my minis, after they were painted and done, and it's a drag. So instead of using the supplied rod I took thin brass and knocked together some sturdier ones. My soldering skills are very rough but hopefully with more practice it'll get better.

The rest of the new stuff. We have 7 French 1/2400 GHQ destroyers (labels are on them now) for Naval Thunder; battleships are next for the French. I also finished some 6mm sci-fi tanks from Adler/Darkest Star that I've had in bags for about 7 years. There are 3 pieces of 6mm modern UK microarmor that were done. These were bought in 1986 at GenCon and I've painted them 3 times already. This is their final strip and repaint and will show up in some what-if Cold War games. The garbage cans are resin from Scenic Express and will be used for scatter terrain, nothing fancy but useful.

I finally got decals on my Timmee 1/48 AC130. I found an old set of Microscale gunship decals among my modelling stuff and threw them on. They aren't "historically accurate" for this particular bird but the bird is a plastic army plane with imaginary guns. I think it dresses it up nicely.

I put the "Ghost Rider" nose art on it. The big seam line is pretty pronounced on this toy and since the plastic is flexible it doesn't go away easily. I could have gone all out on it but it's a game piece and if I put in that amount of time it'd never see time in a game.

In progress...

Here's what's in the pipeline so far. My wife challenged me to build buildings for my imagi-nation modern Africa so work begins. These are 2 foamcore buildings I started. They'll get time in my 28mm games and will be generic enough to possibly fit into colonial games as well. They need some paint and extras (doors, awnings, etc) but a few more of these and I'll have a nice base for commandos to raid.

While working on the buildings I thought I'd knock together some brick buildings for it, but realized I needed a few more. Casting time! And since I was messing around with my Hirst arts molds why not order his new brick sets and some sci-fi ones? I don't like scribing brickwork but also don't want to always have to buy brick buildings. These fit that middle ground nicely. Shipping from Hirst was fast, I know there's more to order.

An MDF ruin that was sitting on my shelf for years came out of storage and was constructed. Some rubble was glued on and I'll add a bit more of detail.

The last 2 sections of my Hudson & Allen castle awaiting some dry brushing. They were washed along with some homemade scatter terrain and an O scale RR building.