28mm Samnite 'Colorful Legion' Mercenaries for Saga Age of Hannibal

Eight Samnite 'Colorful Legion' warriors. These will be a mercenary unit for Saga Age of Hannibal. 

Old Glory figures. I'm still experimenting with contrast paints on tunics and larger areas with mixed results. 

Eight figures to add to the 2021 totals. Next up on the painting table are twelve 28mm Gaul Archers to start my Carthaginian force for Saga Age of Hannibal.

 

Hobby Room Construction - Part 4

Construction continues! Drywall is up and ready for 'mud' and tape next week. It's pretty amazing how just getting the flat white drywall up on the walls makes the room look bigger, and much closer to how it will eventually look. I still have a lot of work left to do after the carpenters finish the drywall, but once they're done a lot of that work consists of things I'll be doing myself.

Video tour below.

Game room lighting plan

Sorry for the fuzzy screen-shot but here is the lighting plan for the game room and painting/laser studio. All lighting will be daylight spectrum LED flat panels, with dimmer capability should I have selected 'too much' light. I'm not sure there is such thing at my age, but just in case.

The game table will obviously be put under the eight (8) 2'x4' lights and the painting table under the pair of lights on the far left. The green area is a low area of the ceiling where a beam is. It's still high enough to walk under comfortably unless you play center for the NBA, but it does segment the space as far as lighting is concerned. 

I've always struggled with getting enough light on my gaming table. Starting over fresh has let me attack the problem with a good portion of overkill. If it's worth doing, it's worth OVER-doing!

 

Hobby Room Construction - Part 3

This update - a video update for those of you that do not follow my YouTube channel. I've finished all of the "rough-in" work, and have passed the building inspector's inspections. I'm ready and waiting for my drywall contractor to start putting up the walls! I'll still have plenty of work to do after that doing the trim work, painting and flooring. The final step will be having a hung ceiling professionally installed. I think I'm on pace to have the room completed before enough of my friends have their vaccine and are ready to come over for a game!

 

Saga Age of Hannibal - Carthage vs. Rome Game

 My friend Mike hosted a Saga Age of Hannibal game for my friend Greg and I yesterday as part of his 'virtual Saga campaign'. Mike is doing an amazing job of hosting the tabletop battle, supplying the miniatures and moving the figures while two players play virtually through his hands. 

Greg was a great opponent, and his Romans are tough and he plays them well. For a second game in a row I got more mileage out of my levy bowmen than they should get thanks to the Carthaginian 'Eagle Eye' ability. Greg had both of my Elephants near exhaustion multiple times, and easily dispatched my warlord, who recklessly chased away the much feared Cretan archer mercenaries.

Great to have a fulfilling tabletop experience thanks to Mike's great game mastering. This is unedited footage. There are some visitors watching along who comment from time to time.

Hobby Room Construction - Part 2

Update #2 for the hobby room construction. The framing has been completed, including two storage closets and the wall to separate the finished space from the mechanical/utility room. Next up is the wiring, which I'll be doing myself.

#progress

New Hobby Room - Construction Begins

I've recently relocated to a new home now that I'm single again. When picking the home I prioritized getting something with an area I could dedicated to a painting studio and wargaming room. My old place had a finished basement family room and a 'bonus' room that I converted for this purpose. I wanted something similar. What I found was a nice home with a completely unfinished basement, but one with high ceilings and full-sized windows. This first photo is where the game table will be.

These are photos of the project after two days of work by the carpenters. The walls are lined with rigid foam insulation as a heat and vapor barrier. This is a necessary step here in New Hampshire where that concrete is below freezing part of the year. The room will eventually have a hung ceiling to allow for access to mechanical functions. 

The space will feature a generous area for a 6'x12' table, with a side area for my painting studio and display cases. I'm hoping to have it all finished in time for the flurry of gaming we all hope to do as vaccinations become the norm. This final photo looks into the painting studio area.

28mm 'Romanized' Samnites

Ten Old Glory 28mm Samnites. These will be artillery train guard 'soldier' stands in Hannibal At the Gates. Each stand will be five figure groups as shown. I've equipped these with Roman scutum shields and more uniform tunics while retaining their traditional Samnite helmets. 

I experimented with contrast paints on the tunics with results I'm not thrilled with. The helmet feathers are also contrast paints and I'm thrilled with how they look. The rest of the work on the figures used traditional techniques.  Ten figures, to start the year's painting progress off. Next up on the painting table are eight more Samnites. These next ones will be Samnite 'colorful legion' warriors to be used as mercenaries in Saga Age of Hannibal games.

One note: I'm still working on my new studio space, so my laser cutter/engraver is currently out of service, so basing many of the figures I've painted this year will be a big project for later this year.

2020 Year in Review

This post is criminally late. I apologize for that. What can I say about 2020 that hasn't been said thousands of times before? For me 2020 included, in addition to the pandemic, some personal challenges. I got divorced, had to buy a new home, move and start many parts of my life over. Through it all, my wargaming hobby, family and friends (many of them are wargamers) helped me get through the dark times. Here's hoping 2021 is as much as an improvement for all of you that I hope it will be for me.

Now on to the hobby content. My favorite unit of the year, pictured top left, was my Macedonian Hypaspists. Honorable mention go to my Finnish WWII Ski Patrol squad. A majority of the projects this year were 28mm Macedonians, with a smattering of Finnish WWII and even one science fiction project, some Fallout Wasteland Warfare miniatures that I painted for my friend Gordon. Due to being held up in isolation from the global pandemic, painting totals were up significantly over 2019, but games were way down. Much of what I painted is yet to be based, as I still haven't finished setting up the infrastructure for my laser cutter, so I am without means to cut bases. Hopefully that will be resolved soon.

This year's totals:

• Painted 25/28mm Figures:235
• Painted 28mm Vehicles: 2
  
• Terrain/Misc Created: 8
• Stands Re-based: 0
• Puchased Painted 28mm Figures:133
• Purchased Painted 28mm Vehicles:0
• X-wing Mods & Re-paints: 4
• Games Hosted: 1
• Games Played: 8

 

Games played this year were primarily virtual games. The majority of these were one on one games of Chain of Command played via Zoom generously hosted by my friend Greg. The one game I hosted was an outdoor game open air in my garage.  

 

I paused painting completely for about four months while I was in transition between homes. Once my new home was purchased I set up a temporary studio in a spare bedroom in order to resume painting and streaming on my Twitch.tv channel. My new home has an unfinished basement that I've already begun finishing. This new space will hopefully be just as nice or maybe a little better than my previous game room and painting studio. Being single does have some advantages. When buying houses I looked more intently at the basements than any married man would have the luxury of doing. 

Here's hoping 2021 brings all of you a vaccine, and a return to face-to-face gaming. I know we all could use more of THAT.

Laser Infrastructure - Part 1

This past summer I got a divorce and bought a new home to live in. One of the unfortunate consequences of this is I have to re-build all of the support infrastructure that is required to operate my laser engraver. Although the laser is an amazing tool for both my wargaming and radio-control aircraft hobbies, it does require a large amount of infrastructure to operate safely. This is part one of what I hope will only be two installments on this subject. This does include efforts that spanned several months, but for brevity I am including them all here in one update.

To the left two switches and an outlet. The outlet is an always-on 110 volt AC outlet to power the laser. Not shown are the two receptacles that the switches operate, both are elsewhere. Eventually this wall will be covered in drywall. On the opposite side of the wall will be an airbrush compressor run by the left-most switch. This blows compressed 30 PSI (2 bar for you non-Imperial types) air in the path of the laser to clear smoke which would impede the laser's ability to cut.   

The right-most switch is a three-way switch that operates this 600 CFM (0.3 m^3/s) exhaust 'blower' that evacuates the combustion byproducts from the laser. This keeps the air in the laser cabinet clear of power-sapping smoke as well as prevents it from asphyxiating the operator. Very important that this works properly! The other partner to the three-way switch is located where my spray booth will be, allowing me to use the exhaust system for both purposes by adding in some 'blast gates' for the vent pipes. 

Finally, an all-metal vent added to the exterior of my new home. This was by FAR the most nerve-wracking part of the operation. I needed to buy a proper mounting plate and line up everything so that it fit properly over the vinyl siding. As far as I'm concerned, it looks pretty good to me!

Part two of this will be running all of the interior piping for the exhaust system, including the blast gates and junctions for the spray booth and laser. Some of this is going to require me to order some specialty parts not offered at the local home center. Luckily, now that I have the external work done, I can do the exhaust piping even during the winter months - possibly during Christmas break since I won't be doing a lot of visiting with family due to the ongoing pandemic.