Avast 2014!

2014 has well and truly arrived in New Zealand and I have already started making wargaming purchases, planning future games, and working on finishing some current projects. Particularly ones that could be used to add value to other projects...

Original paint work on left, new paint job on right.

A few years back I discovered some cheap toy pirate ships for sale, so I bought five of them with the idea of painting them up and using them for gaming. A friend of mine has a rather large lounge with blue carpet and the idea was to use them for a type of naval floor war game. Like a great deal of projects, this one has languished for a number of years before I recently got inspired to relook at pirate stuff after seeing my friend Ken's 15mm collection of pirate stuff.

Now with Hat Marine for scale.

Having acquired a couple more ships (more on that later) I have enough ships to put to sea two small fleets. All I need to do is a little prep work - removing stickers and blogging some holes - and then I can paint them and use them.

Another view of the two ships.

The paint job will be fairly basic, but hopefully quantity will have a quality of its own! Plus once I finish the fleet I can use it for gaming, rather than have it sit in a box waiting to be used. After all, why have toys if you don't play with them!

Close up on stern detail.

 Thanks for looking, and I hope you all have an excellent 2014!

Cannon

Some time ago I had a conversion with Glenn about some of his wargaming projects. For one of these projects he was going to remount some artillery pieces onto new carriages from the Billing Boats range.  This seemed like such a good idea I decided to steal it for one of my own projects.

Red Cannon - Evolution, Pale Cannon - Orion.

 The cannon needing new carriages are from the Orion English Pirates set, and the Evolution Pirates set. Links are to the reviews by PSR. The cannon suppilied in both of these sets are too big for their respective gun carriages, so I had been considering building up replacements with matchsticks, or massively cutting the guns down to fit the tiny carriages.

A Billings Boats sprue containing parts for two gun carriages.

 I was able to obtain these off the shelf from my local model store for around NZ$7. The packet contained two sprues, each with enough bits to build two gun carriages. No instructions are contained in the packet, but figuring it out is not too hard if you use an existing gun carriage as reference, and try a dry run first.

Some cutting down was required to get the gun to sit in a pleasing manner.

Comparison to the Hat Royal Navy cannon.

Orion cannon, pre and post treatment.

Both Orion guns finished.

I still have a few more bits and pieces to do on this project, but it is progressing nicely. Thanks again to Glenn for his idea!