Maori progress

After an enforced delay due to heat and icky tum my New Zealand Wars project is under way!!

The first batch of figures I received from Empress took just half an hour to clean up and glue to wooden bases; that was for twenty four figures and included the time needed to score hatch marks on the figure bases to ensure better adhesion!! I was very please with that. There was very small areas of flash on closer inspection but so little and so light it was easily missed and came off with very little effort. How many other figures could you clean up and base in such a short period of time? I have now ordered a second batch which should be here this week, enough to give me three units of ten infantry and some extra militia figures, some forty figures in all with what I already have.

All twenty four figures of the first batch are now undercoated and the twenty infantry figures have the coat colour on. The detailing is crisp and deep enough to make life that much easier, it is also good enough to allow me to use the Army painter dip on them confident that judicious use will bring great results. Figures with poor detailing are difficult to use dip with, there just isn't anything to work with and the figure just looks dirty. Good detailing is lifted and highlighted with the dip, faces work really well and with little effort a well detailed figure can look great...faces can be soooo tricky!

I have also begun to consider the issue of terrain more closely. New Zealand has unique flora (and fauna of course) and this is going to be a bit of a bugger to recreate. Charles Darwin wrote that on a visit to the newly settled north island in 1838 he saw some English oak, but these were definitely grown by the settlers as a long term resource; not native and not beyond the settlements area of cultivation. A New Zealand company make some self build plants but aimed at the model railway market at OO/OH scale. I know plants can be a variety of sizes but when you are using 28mm figures you do need something larger, otherwise the games look like battles in local allotments! The owner of the company, Graeme, has had parcels made up and weighed so he could tell me what postage to England would be. Six packs (between eighteen and thirty or so models depending upon species) would cost $NZ15.00, about £8.00, so not too nasty. I have asked whether, as he makes them, the models parts could not be up scaled to better suit wargamer needs. I am awaiting his reply.