LittleWars1913

 I have some HAT Austrians that I intend to paint at some point (some are currently painted as British, French and Dutch!) so I thought I'd tried printing a 54mm Austrian Cavalryman as a test.

Still needs some cleaning up but looks pretty good.

The cavalryman took 2 hours to print, the horse 5 hours.  I have a load of spare painted 54mm Napoleonic horses in the loft that I am not using, so I'll see if he will fit on one of those which might be easier to produce a unit.

 I have now printed 4 54mm figures using my 3d printer and this is the latest of them after tweaking a number of settings.

The figures are Russian Napoleonic Infantry designed for 28mm and resin printing rather than the FDM printer I have.

The figure is scaled to 175% size and I have tweaked settings to thicken the walls of the figure, etc which means that the thinner scabbards now cast properly and don't break off.

I am pretty happy with this one and think I should be able to print off a unit to experiment with painting.

I have been asked about printers and settings so technical info follows:

The printer is a Cubicon Style which I bought in 2016 as it had an enclosed case (which made printing ABS easier and I wanted to use it to print components to turn into metal in vulcanised moulds) and it had an auto-leveling plate.

The settings for the figure above are:

0.4mm nozzle
ABS
0.2 layer height
supports are everywhere with an angle of 65 degrees, 10% fill and a grid pattern  (I find that these are the easiest to remove.)
There is no raft beneath the print.
Wall thickness is 6, top and bottom are 3

 I have been watching the growing list of 3d printable Napoleonic figures with interest.  They are mostly available for 28mm with a very few people offering them printed in 54mm, but at that size they cost £5+ for a single figure.

I have an FDM printer (which I've had for 8 years) and have started playing around with a new version of the software and some 28mm Napoleonic Russian stl files to see what can be achieved.

The files supplied are really designed for resin printing but I have managed to work out how to create files that will print on an FDM printer.

This is a quick photo of my first effort.

On the left is a HAT Austrian line infantry man and on the right is a 3d printed Russian Fusilier officer.  He could do with some more cleaning up on the supports but I think he had come out quite well.

He is printed at 175% size of the 28mm original figure and comes out about the right size for matching with HAT.

If I can get some consistent results this would mean I could add a small Russian and Austrian contingent to my 1/32 Napoleonics collection at some point in the future.

Finished cutting and then assembling the Bastions and an extra piece of city wall.  It is all starting to look quite big now!  The city will eventually cover 4' x 5'.

I need to replace the longer piece of wall with one with a gate in it.

Next up will the demi-lunes, one with a road through it...

 Haven't done much over the last month.  We took delivery of our first caravan at the end of September so time has been spent sorting that out and we went away for 6 nights as our first trip back in October.

I have finally managed to get around to some painting and scenery building.

I also finished cutting and assembled the 3 Ravelins for Dendermonde today.  They will need texturing with tissue paper and painting.

On to the 3 bastions which are partly cut next.

Played the 2nd game in our Friostgrave campaign using the Mausoleum I got painted this week.  Was a close game with skeletons proving strangely hard to kill.

Judicious use of the Fool's Gold spell that lets you steal a treasure from someone carrying it and move it 4" let me steal 2 treasures off Nick and get 3 treasures off the board. 

Need to play more often to remember the rules better...

Anthony and I played a 54mm Blucher game on an 8'x 5' table.  I took the  French vs Anthony's British (as usual). 

We played through 16 turns (8 each) before having to stop as we ran out of time.  The game was  still pretty even at that point - I'd lost a light cavalry unit but his light cavalry was pretty spent and his allied infantry was starting to be worn down.

We were able to resume the game 3 days later and play it through to a conclusion.

My left flank ended with the mutual destruction of both sides Light Cavalry with me losing 3 units to the British 2.

But, I was able to apply pressure to the weaker Dutch Belgian allied corps on  their Right  wing and that forced Anthony to use his command to slowly withdraw them as they were in danger of losing 2-3 units.  He also concentrated his main attack on the his left wing heavy cavalry who were facing the French heavy cavalry.

This meant that he was unable to manouevre the higher quality, stronger British corps in the centre and it was left to exchange skirmish fire with my weaker french/allied troop corps.

His concentration on the heavy cavalry was his undoing as he was convinced he could win the combats and I managed to consistently throw slightly better dice than him which meant his units were worn out slightly faster than mine.  Also, he didn't withdraw any units as they neared breaking point and I kept enough of an upper hand to break all 4 of his heavy cavalry with the loss of 3 of my own units.

This put us on 6 units lost each - the British break point was 6, the French 7, so the British army broke and ran givng a French victory.

It was a very close and quite tense game at times - we got a couple of things wrong but that didn't change any outcomes.

Spent some time today cutting bases for the Ravelins and bastions and working out sizing for the Demi-lunes.  

I have decided to redo the Ravelin without a hexed base as it is too hard to get them to line up correctly with the bastions without a lot of fiddling.

I also started on cutting the extra base tiles need to complete the 8' x 5' table.  The pictures show roughly what it will look like, the green area runs up to were the glacis will be, beyond that will be the ditch and behind the walls will be the city streets.

I am starting wonder about using removeable tape to stick the tiles down to the boards so I can move them on and off the table without having to pack them away each time.  Anyone worked with any removeable tape - I know you can get it for temporarily hanging pictures.

The glacis is proving a problem to design as it is so large and the bases for it will have to be made is several parts as will the grass slope.  I am wondering about laser cutting the back wall and covered way and firing platform and then making the rest out of foam board cut by hand.

Finished off another infantry sprue for another swedish 30YW Epic unit - yellow regiment this time.  Quick picture showing the result, need varnishing and flags adding.

I picked up another Push the Pike box cheaply off someone who was selling it with some extras for a pretty good price.

So, I now only have 29 more infantry units to paint, 9 cavalry sprues to finish and 3 scots units (probably in Swedish service) and everything will be done.

Planning on trying painting a cavalry sprue next and then I'll switch to painting some Imperial units.

 Finally got back to painting some figures and finished off a 25mm Minifigs battalion of French Marlburians for the Dendermonde project.

 Not been that well this week - probably Covid as it seems to be going round but did manage to finish off another scenery tile for Frostgrave.

This is the diorama base that comes with the Reaper diorama "Dragons Don't Share".  I've left the holes for the dragon to stand in so I can still use it as a display piece when I get round to painting the figures for it.

We have started a Frostgrave campaign amongst three of us at the Guildford club so I have an incentive to exapnd on the terrain choices.

 I played a game a couple of weeks ago against my regular opponent Anthony using my 40mm AWI collection and the Osprey Rebels and Patriots Rules.

We played the Great River Race scenario where one side is attempting to get 3 rafts of supplies down a river while the other side tries to stop them.

I quickly scratch built 3 rafts from balsa wood and dowel and setup the table using a naval mat with my hex terrain on top of it to create a 12" wide river.

We got a few things wrong with the rules initially and the river layout wasn't quite right, but we had a fun game that ended in a draw with one raft sunk, one raft captured and one raft escaped.

Definitely a scenario I will replay (I've got 3 rafts now!).