10th Hussars - Floyd's Troop

Exciting times - got hit by a car AND 5 boxes of British Napoleonic Hussars arrived.  Decided to use the two days off work getting started on them - I don't get paid if I miss work in my job so I wanted to put this "recovery" time to good use.

Step 1 - Get knocked off your bike by a blind woman in a Toyota, this will give you four straight days including the weekend to get started on the 10th Hussars.

Step 2 - cut off all the pieces and sort them into parts you will need/not need - the fullest box here contains all the latter, the marvellous array of pre-1815 headgear and raised arms etc. Note most important item of equipment, bottom right.

Step 3 - assemble horses - there are 9 possible combinations. so I try to mix them for maximum variety. Here are 50 horses, I shall be making a Troop of the 10th Hussars who at Waterloo numbered no more than 50 in the field (don't want to make MORE than 1:1 ratio!).

Step 4 - attach riders to horses - this is a matter of personal preference - some people prefer to paint the riders separately, some even prefer to do this on the sprue. I'm open to experiment and may well try some of these other approaches for the next batch I do. A number of pros and cons come to mind for each method.

Step 4 - the castings are beautifully clean - nothing like the amount of flash you get on metals - the only little thing that needs fixing is a slight indentation in the top of the shakos. Fixed with a blob of glue.

Step 5 - I added a few little bits and bobs to some of the figures - bags,boxes, fiddles etc.

Step 6 - undercoated the horses with a black matt enamal from a DIY store.

Step 6 - undercoated the riders with a very matt black from Humbrol

Step 7 - Faces done. It's all downhill from here in terms of my painting. At this point, faces done and the rest all matt black, I always think my figures look great and I dwell on how nice it would be to have a Brunswick army. They never look so good again, each ensuing step slowly makes them look worse!

Step 8 - Breeches. Grey and then the yellow stripe done later

Step 9 - braid on pelisse - was dreading this as I'd never tried braid before. First attempts to follow lines of braid with yellow paint looked poor. In the end I just blocked in the area with yellow, then washed with a dark blue watercolour, then picked out raised areas with a light yellow and then a little gold. It won't win any prizes but I like it and I hope it will look ok en masse.

 Step 10. The only thing I'm not a fan of on these Perry sculpts is that the medallion-type ends to the cords of the shakos are on the right chest of each torse. These are supposed to "connect" with the cords from the shako. Most of the time you can bend the cord to be near the tip on the chest but it's a pretty messy arrangement. I must confess I hadn't worked this out when I glued all the heads on and consequently some of the cords are too far away. In these cases I cut off the plastic cord and made my own with cotton thread.

Step 11 - I did the same for this officer's reins. I'd cut off his collar and reglued it so that he could twist right round in the saddle (to make sure his men were following him!). This left a big gap between left hand and reins so I added some new ones with thread.

Step 12 - Dangling part of shako cords painted yellow.

Step 13 - Red shako done. Plenty to tidy up later. Back to work tomorrow but will return to this asap. Thanks for looking!



Posted by Lord Hill at 12:26