Thanks to the Mordheim Yahoo Groups forum I’ve been directed to a couple of interesting rule sets for swimming and boating on the river Stir. There’s the basic Lustria swimming rules and a nice set of additional rules for boating from Ye Olde Curiosity Shope. They’ll both do nicely for any Mordheim gaming around the canal.

I’m still casting wall builder pieces for the canal and appear to be running a little low on Ultracal 30, so this might be the last large project for a while. I’m undecided if I should use resin, or just good old furniture varnish to represent the canal water. Might require a bit of minor experimentation with painting and varnishing to get a decent water effect - fortunately there’s a lot of decent water modelling articles on the web as well as numerous examples. There’s a particularly lovely WWII diaorama online magazine that I can’t find again curses.

I’ve started planning a three foot, three tile canal for Mordheim after I discovered that the fieldstone tiles I already have can easily be raised to an appropriate (Hirst Arts friendly) height with simple foam blocks. For example here’s a dry-fit canal staircase - you can see the edge of the foam block to the upper left:

Of course a canal requires walls, something I didn’t want to build from individual Hirst Arts fieldstone pieces because it requires so much casting. So I sacrificed a few of my earlier 4″ high wall builder casts and tried scoring and breaking, as well as bandsawing them in half to get long pieces 2″ high. Alas set and dry Ultracal 30 is very hard to cut and break reliably and I have no Ultrasil to create any new molds with.

Desperation led me to build a ’separator’ with a cut up CD jewel case cover and superglue. The separator places a thin rectangle in the middle of the poured and setting wall builder mold. Here’s a shot of a poured mold that’s had the separator removed once the Ultracal 30 starting ‘cooking’:

Fortunately this separator worked like a charm and I can create two 2″ high wall builder sections from each pour of the mold and it only takes 3 pours to provide enough wall builder sections for a single 1′ tile. Here’s a cast of the original wall builder mold, with a cast created with the separator in place, and the separator itself.

Nice to see there’s a New Zealand company importing Rackham figures from France. These are absolutely beautiful 28mm sculpts and quite reasonably priced too. Now I’ve just got to resist picking up a few lovely Undead figures for my Warhammer force…

I’ve been lurking on this miniature figure sculpting Yahoo Groups forum for quite some time. There’s a lot of interesting advice and comments from some very experienced commercial sculptors on here. I fully anticipate bugging them with annoying questions once those 28mm armatures arrive.

I love the Black Gobbo. It’s an ‘e-zine’ published monthly by Games-Workshop US. They usually have at least one article that gets me itching to break out the xacto knife and start cutting up foam-card.

Definitely worth email-subscribing to if you haven’t already!

Our recent Amazon order arrived and contains two interesting books I picked up while the exchange rate is so good: A General History of Pyrates and The Buccaneers of America. Both look to be some interesting reading.

There’s a couple of auctions running on TradeMe for some interesting looking 28mm poseable white metal armatures. These are evidently from Ebob Miniatures, a German? or British? manufacturer by the looks of it.

I’ve been tempted to try sculpting in the past, but working up from a bent wire armature has always seemed rather daunting. These would seem to be the ideal way to experiment without having to worry too much about getting the basic proportions right.

So I just ordered two packs of five and it only cost $15NZ including shipping.