“Beastly Beginnings”

Well as you can imagine as I only posted my intentions on Thursday, I haven’t really got very far with progress on the figures themselves (though some participants have now finished there first submissions!! Yes Roy I’m looking at you). Anyway back in the slow lane, first job was to do a bit of planning (yes I do plan how I do these things believe it or not!), and the first thing I noticed was that neither figure would currently fit onto the two pence pieces I use to base all my 28mm figures, this along with the fact that as everyone who knows me is aware that I dislike figures stood with their feet ridiculously far apart meant that a trip to the garage and some major base “surgery” was called for. Now the bases on the “Bronze age” dollies are a) Pretty thick and b) made of really good quality metal, neither of which was exactly conducive to making this an easy job. I began by trying to cut through them with my junior hacksaw, but discovered there was no way to hold them really stable without damaging the figures themselves, so after a bit of head scratching I decided to try and sand down the thickness of the bases a bit with my power sander. This is a Bosch circular version and the best way I’ve found to use it to do this is to kneel on the floor (not the most comfortable thing to do at my age), then hold the sander upside-down between my knees and run the bases of the figures over the surface of the spinning sanding disk. You have to swop between figure every now and again as the soon start to build up heat from all the friction.

Anyway after doing this for a while and removing a thin layer from the bottom of the bases (a really thin layer, these figure metal is TOUGH!), I then took my large wire snippers and just about managed to cut through the bases (nearly breaking my thumb in the process!). After this it was a case of easing the legs together, leveling out the bases again then sanding them slightly again to the bottom flat and level again. After this it was a case of checking they now fitted onto a “tuppence”, and with a bit more snipping and filing around the outer edges of the bases they now did, so I could now glue them onto the coins. I added two layers of card beneath the bases to add height, but looking at them now I think that might be too much, but I can always “snap” them off and remove a layer later on if I decide too.

So that’s where I’m up to so far, early days, but at least I can start to add some “greenstuff” to them now (last year I spent the whole of the first week filing down one of my figures so I’m already ahead of that). Hopefully in my next post I’ll have something a bit more interesting to show you.

So till next weekend, Excelsior!! Roger.