Monster Magnet

Don't you love it when you paint up a regiment with a lot of passion, spend hours upon hours shading and basing, only to have your models fall over 1000x during a 60min game?

I don't.

And that's why I wanted to try magnetizing my WHFB regiments. There are several ways to do that (buying individual magnets, magnetic paint etc..), but I chose to give pre-cut magnets and ferromagnetic foil a try, because they seemed the mose elegant solution.


I found this nice little online shop called Magnetbases.de, who ship at reasonable rates (~€4 within Europe which can be considered more than honest, compared to all these crooks who "offer" shipping at €10 and more).

The owner, Magnus Schwekendiek, is a nice fellow who will answer all your questions about size, compatibility, shipping etc...

On top of that, you get a small discout for ordering 3 or more base sets of the same type, e.g. if you buy 3 or more 2x5 20mm base sets, the price drops from €1.60 per set to €1.44.

This can save you a euro or two when you are basing more than one regiment of 20 men. Instead of buying 2 sets of 4x5 bases, just buy 4 sets of 2x5 and cash the discount.




This is what the bases look like. The ferromagnetic foil is included. Bases are pre-cut and have a "sticky" side, which makes then very user friendly to apply to the models.


Just peel off the protective foil, stick the magnet to your model, and put the model on the magnetic foil. Done. I glued the foil to movement trays for increased stability.

(I apologise for the unfinished models!)

Here you can see the magnetic foil I glued to the movement tray.

The magnet is roughly 0.7mm thick and does heighten the model a little. I had concerns about this at first, before buying the magnets, but they were quickly dispelled. The additional height is far beyond anything noticable. I'd be more concerned about the paintjob than about that :)

Aaaah! What a feeling of relief! No more shifting and falling models! BTW, this ALSO works with metal minatures... pretty amazing.

So if you have been hesitating to get magnets for your models, I can REALLY recommend this stuff. One of the most useful features for tabletop games.

Below I listed 6 advantages of magnetic bases, which make them more than worthwile in my eyes:

1) Protection. The models stand in place and do not fall over - which happens VERY readily during games. On top of that it abolishes this little annoying phenomenon of knocking over light plastic miniatures as you are placing more onto the tray, during setup.

2) Transport. You can actually transport the regiment as a whole! It also makes moving the regiment from its shelf onto the battlefield and vice versa a 100% safe undertaking. Especially for standard bearers, which tend to have a high center of gravity and fall over easily (rest in peace Questing Knight standard bearer).

3) Price. At around €2/ set there really is no excuse for not getting these. If you consider that some people are buying GW plastic "hills" at €25 *shudder*, you would like to advise them to save their money and buy magnetic bases instead.

4) Not so easy to make yourself. I am a big fan of only buying things you cannot manufacture yourself. So scenery is out. You cannot easily make magnetic bases yourself, so there is your reasonable buy.

5) Feel. The magnets and metal foil add a little extra weight to plastic regiments, which adds to this "old school" feel that I know from my early days, where all miniatures were metal. This might sound silly, but it does feel so much cooler to push around a "heavy" block of "massive" infantry, rather than something that feels like 20 LEGO figures...

6) Standalone. You do not necessarily need movement trays to glue the foil into! Although it is recommended as it adds a lot of stability, you can move around your miniatures on the battlefield with them standing only on the foil.

I hope this will inspire some of you guys to give magnetic bases a try,

Cheers,
Tom

Heavy Cavalry

Every piece of artillery needs proper protection. This is best achieved by heavily armoured, kick-ass, armoured bretonnian knights.

Here's my very first bretonnian regiment! I wanted to make them look "teutonic": hence the black cross on white background and a few gold elements.

I hope you like them!
Take care!

PS: Now I know why there are so few Bretonnia players... the models take 100 years to paint! Don't let the "simple" colour scheme fool you.





[EDIT]: Added 2 pics of the Paladin (i.e. Hero)

Potato field artillery: Part six (final)

There it is! Behold: the completed trebuchet! *pride*

Unfortunately I cannot show the second one because I don't have it here at the moment, but I might do a re-edit of this post and add a few pics in the future ;)

I speed painted the crew, so please don't go looking for too many details as I kept them very basic so that I can get them over with as fast as I could (I did not paint eyes... shame on me). At one point I even tried to use ink-wash on their faces (a method which I dispise by the way) to go even faster... but that looked so horrendously crappy, that I finally ended up painting their faces my "normal" way.

I will let this be a lesson to me: No matter how fast you want to finish you minis, NEVER EVER use ink wash on faces. It looks disgusting even if you are in a hurry... yak!

All right, enough lecturing. Enter, the pics! Click to enlarge.

Potato field artillery: Part five (update)

Because it was so much wor.... erm "fun" to build my trebuchet, I decided to make it a double feature.

Please put your eyeballs on the twins Arty and Larry (Arty + Larry = "Artillery"... get it? Hihihi).

There will be a last part (number 6) with the full painted crew. But that will take a while since I will wait to get home so I can make better conversions for my crew (I have more bits at home).

I just can't help imagining those firing flaming projectiles across a night sky towards a besieged Jerusalem in 1099

Let the siege begin!

Potato field artillery: Part five

Trebuchet painted! Now all that is missing is the crew :)

I chose a "teutonic" heraldry. Bretonnians are usually portrayed as "french"-ish knights. I wanted germanic looking knights, to break with that Games Workshopesque cliché.

(I have actually started painting some bretonnian knight miniatures, but I won't reveal those until the full regiment is painted :P )

Enjoy!

Potato field artillery: Part four

There is a wonderful thing called "modular movement tray".

I bought a pack of it and used it to make the base for my trebuchet. Oh and I also found someone at the local GW who agreed to share a box of Bretonnian Men-at-arms with me! So I was able to build the crew! Wohooo! :)

See you soon!

Potato field artillery: Part three

Added sling and cranking mechanism. NOW it starts to look like a trebuchet :)
I am currently desperately looking for a way of getting hold of just 8 bretonnian men-at-arms to build the crew, so if any of you have some left they are willing to trade/sell, give me a sign ;)
Enjoy!

The wood elf model is just for scale. That is what I call a proper sized warmachine ;)

Potato field artillery: Part two

The coutnerweight is done. I scultped it from putty and built a little suspension mechanism to attach it to the throwing arm.

Potato field artillery: Part one

Isn't the Games Workshop Trebuchet ridiculously small?


Yes it is. And too expensive for my taste too.

I always wanted to build a warmachine from scratch, and trebuchets have a charme that is undeniable. Trebuchets (from the french verb "trebucher", to "fall over") appeared in both Christian and Muslim armies around the Mediterranean in the 1200s. It could throw 140 kg projectiles at high speeds into enemy fortifications. Nasty things such as "greek fire" and disease-infected corpses were flung into cities.

Anyway, here's the first part (of 2 or 3) that follows my progress through the construction of such an awesome device... at a 1:35 scale, that is.

(My trebuchet is just a model that is aiming at looking more realistic than the GW version, but it won't actually fire chewing gum balls across the room.)


Concept sketch.

The base. A 1m stick of balsa wood costs around €0.30. With 2 pieces (and a little effort) you have enough to make a whole trebuchet. That comes A LOT cheaper than buying the GW model at €30!

I figured gluing the beams in place would not be solid enough. So I made a little "hole and pin" system to allow for more solidity. After all it is a wargaming miniature, and will be touched/moved around quite a lot.

The 2 first beams and the throwing arm are in place. The arms moves around a "toothpick" axis.

I added some green-stuff details (such as shields). In order to make nails, I just made green stuff "sausages" which I cut into thin slices. The slices can be glued onto the model to simulate the nails used by bretonnian engineers to build their trebuchet. I also cut out streks of cardboard, which will serve as the metal braces that hold the beams in place.

This is as much as I got so far. Now i will have to add the couterweight, the sling and the cranking mechanism. Stay tuned ;)