The Pontoon Bridge

As a part of my current rash oddball projects I have made up a pontoon bridge building set.

I have wanted to do something like this for a long time and have eyed that Renedra pontoon bridge since it was first released maybe eight to ten years ago. Well finally I bought one...actually I bought two, because it can be built as just a wooded bridge and I figured I might have a need for one of those, but it will probably just sit unassembled in the spares area for a couple of years.

But the pontoon bridge alone was never going to be satisfactory so I bought the Perry French Napoleonic bridge builders set as well.

You can almost imagine that this shot is taken at a standup at the Grand Armée Annual Conference and the officer is saying "Good morning everyone, my name is Colonel Pivet and I would line to introduce my team: to my left is Captain Delafont, who is on secondment from the staff and whose interests include bridge building, travel, ornithology and cordon blu cooking; to his left is private Arnoux, who is the comedian of our group and likes nothing better than serving up exploding croissants to his teammates..."

I mounted them all on 20mm Renedra plastic bases, carving wooden planking into the bases for the three sappers that will be working on the bridge. The officers were given grassed bases, figuring that they probably would be observing from the bank anyway. The two lads in the water could have been left without bases, but they would likely get lost or damaged so I put some water texturing on the base and let them have a swim.

When put together with the bridge the figures make an impressive scene. Clearly this bridge is being built across the Blue Danube, although it was more brown than blue when I saw it.

A

The officers are very happy with everything  and are deciding where to go for coffee.

To further enhance this scene there is a set with a pontoon wagon with four more workers and various pieces of equipment, but sadly it was out of stock when I ordered these so it will have to wait for another time.

French Artillery

The weekend saw the completion of two French Napoleonic gun sets.

The first is a foot gun loading.

The second is a horse gun sighting the piece.

Next up is a pontoon bridge and its construction crew.

Paint Your Wagon

Say the names Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and you think of tough guy films like The Dirty Dozen, the Killers, Dog Day, Dirty Harry, Rawhide, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Ungorgiven, or a host of spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. Between them these two actors contributed to more than 240 films or TV shows (and some of those TV shows ran into hundreds of episodes), between 1950 and today. Marvin died in 1987 aged 63, while Eastwood continues to work at 94.

Given their tough guy images I have always found it odd to think that in 1969 the two of them appeared in the musical comedy film Paint Your Wagon. Even stranger for me is that fact that the song from the film "Wand'rin Star" where Marvin sings in this gravelly voice "...I was born under a wand'rin star...", should be a number 1 hit in the UK for three consecutive weeks in March 1970.

What has this to do with wargames, figure painting, making terrain or anything else I usually write about? Well nothing really. I just needed a title for this post and when I thought of Paint Your Wagon it sent me down one of those memory rabbit holes.

What this post is really about is to show this nice French Napoleonic supply wagon that I finished on Monday. I had been looking at this model on the Perry site for some time now and it has been added and removed from my orders half a dozen times. The hull is a nicely detailed resin casting that needed minimal cleaning.

It is fabulously over loaded with all kinds of clutter, trunks, chests, boxes, bags, blanket rolls and no doubt a fair amount of loot.  It comes with a removable cover.

There is a vivandiere and a rather grim faced driver seated at the front. 

This piece will feature at the centre of a game in the not too distant future.

A Régiment Légère

Following on from the line regiment that I posted last week, here is the matching légère regiment. 

Again there are three battalions, two in tunic and one mixed tunic and greatcoat.

All three battalions and their voltigeur companies deployed.

Couple of line artillery sets, one foot and one horse, are yet to be completed, but next on the painting table is a rather nice Napoleonic French wagon set.

Adding to the Terrain Tiles

My decision to extend my wargames table from 5 feet by 9 feet  to 6 by 10, has presented a problem with my terrain tiles. More correctly the problem is that by expanding the table by just one foot on each axis increases the number of tiles needed to cover the table by fifteen and with my existing inventory is insufficient to cover the table without having a river or stream on every table. So I need to increase the number plain and plain with road tiles by 20.

So I ordered 20 tile MDF frames and the supplier sent me 23 (overruns I presume) for the same price.

In all I made 14 plain tiles, 8 road tiles (two of which are sunken roads) and one beach tile. Here is the whole set laid out on the garage floor.

One of the things that terrain tiles are great for is creating features below the surface, such as rivers, streams, ponds, etc, or hills and ridges that rise above the surface.  What is often not created are those dips in the ground that can give a more rolling terrain. In my first batch of tiles I did five of them with slight dips in them in, but just small ones, a swale if you like. So this time I decided to do something a bit more substantial. I made four of my plain pieces to do just that. The dip is not deep - my tiles are 20mm deep overall and at its deepest the dip is only 13mm below the surface, so it is just a dip rather than a gully. I made them so that they can interface with other dip sections and run for 600mm or more. Two of them have a dip the runs the full length of the tile while two are 'end' pieces, so that they can form one long dip, or two short ones running in from the edge.

I am quite pleased with the way they turned out and at some point may do another five or six of them. Although they don't show up particularly well when photographed, you can see the profile of the dip in the stack shown below.

The only tile that is worth photographing individually is the beach tile with a rocks feature tgat extends out into the water. The addition of this one tile gives me six beach tiles and that means I can now have a beach that runs the full width of the table.

Also complete are the first three of eight small fields that will lay on top of the tiles, helping to conceal joints

French Line Infantry

Ahead of the recent price rise for the Perry plastics I bought three boxes of  line infantry to 'round out' my French Napoleonic army for the solo campaign I am planning for next year. For my 24 figures battalions each box, with an additional command frame, makes two battalions and eight skirmishing figures. 

These three boxes therefore makes six battalions, which added to two other spare battalions that I have makes two brigades - one small division.

Here is the first batch of three battalions - a line infantry regiment. I like the way that the battalions can be built with a mix of figures in tunic and greatcoat.

The First Battalion

The Second

The Third 

The regiment deployed with its voltigeurs to the fore

The second batch will be a three battalion light regiment and some guns will support them.

The Garde on Review

My lack of posts in recent weeks should not be seen as a lack of inactivity on the painting table (far from it in fact) but rather a reflection on how frenetic the real world has been for me of late.

That said, with my Garde Imperiale completed, it is well over due time for a review.

First is the three generals that will command the Garde.

Then there is the infantry, all six battalions.

The artillery, horse and line.

The cavalry

On the painting table, or rather on the basing table, are a number of French line infantry battalions that should grace these pages in the next few days.