Wood, Steel and Gas; Ups and downs

Hi folks!

It's been a fairly busy weekend, so let's tell you about it.
Friday started with a scare, as my wife messaged me at work, that the decorative pieces of apple wood she had in her study had suddenly sprouted holes! Turns out we had a case of interlopers, longhorn beetles to be precise. This was a bit of a scare, as her study is very close to the garage. Where I do all my woodworking. Even more as she found one of the beetles right at the doorstep!
So as soon as I came home friday, I sorted through my wood supply. Sadly my worst fears were confirmed when a lovely large oak tree cross-section I'd been saving for a table showed fresh bore holes.
So a cull of my wood stack was necessary. I had a pile of pallet wood for small projects, that has now been redesignated as campfire wood (more as a precaution). Luckily my fancy woods are treated/kiln-dried and the beetle we found only goes after untreated woods. Still, getting some bug remedy for my wood next week. I'm going to try and save the big oak slab. It's currently sealed in air-tight plastic wrapping with a few pots of alcohol inside, hopefully I can choke/poison most of the bugs that way in preparation for the proper wood treatment.

Saturday afternoon was spent with the airbrush, touching up the primer on my second Necromunda building:

As I had the airbrush out, I also progressed on the Necromunda 2017 cover and doors.
I'd found the proper dilution for the chipping medium, so I've started applying colour to a batch of them, over the rust basecoat:

These require some more faffing about in the future, but so far so good.

I had planned to continue painting my Goliath gang today, but after a visit to the in-laws, my muse thought otherwise. (Fickle thing that she is...)
Never one to argue with inspiration, Gaslands conversions it was. I just pulled out a few cars that I had prepped for conversion (rivets drilled out and metal parts stripped of paint) and started to randomly do thing to them:

I started out with marrying the body of a low-rider pickup truck to the chassis of a bigfoot (The plan is to evoke, rather than outright copy, the bigfoot truck from the latest Mad Max movie). I've been fiddling and adjusting it throughout the afternoon, switching back and forth between it and other conversions. In the back of the picture above you can see a hot-rodded VW Beetle above a donor car that would supply part of it's wheels. I wanted the Beetle as a buggy. I've also added crew to the open-topped Rat Rod. Several cars you see in the pic had nothing done with them today, they were just there to witness the mutilat...erm.."elevation" of their peers.

Here's the Rat Rod with crew (guns and Mad-Maxification to occur at some other time).
Also, the buggy with it's new wheels. (I love the stance it has now!) There is a rather large gap between the rear wheels and the bonnet, this is intentional, as I will be fitting zoomie pipes there. :D
The cab on the Big Foot has reached it's final position as well.

As an encore, I pulled out these two. Same basic car, but the frontmost one has had it's rear wheels/axle mounting replaced to give it more ground clearance and "rake" and it's trunk hatch sawn out (the second one will get it's trunk hatch sawn out as well). Any guesses as to which cars these will be?

See you next time!

A new year, and some Wraiths...

Wow, it's been a month already?
The annual busy period at work has reduced my time and energy available for hobby stuff. That isn't to say I've been totally idle, but that nothing has progressed enough to take new pictures of. The first Necromunda terrain piece is still PIP, although the airbrush stages are past. I need to get the thing on the painting table for some good old-fashioned brushwork.
The Goliath gang is primered and ready for paint.  The Escher have seen a tentative start at building them.
I've packed away my airbrush kit, partly because I needed a change of pace, partly because my mate's airbrush finally arrived and he reclaimed the set of airbrush paints I was borrowing from him. I need to build up my own stock of airbrush paints.
Also, I needed to clear the workbench because I wanted/needed to do some woodworking again.
I'm making a set of pushsticks for a friend who got a tablesaw for his birthday last fall, as well a cupholder as a (very) belated birthday gift for another friend. My plan for the coming year is to alternate woodworking and wargaming/modelling a bit more because, honestly, between work and hobbies, I'm getting a bit fed up with just sitting on my ass all the time.

With Necromunda having run out of steam a little bit, and me needing to relax after work, I've picked up playing The Witcher 3 again. I find it quite relaxing to just explore and slay (or be slain by) the odd roaming monster.  Which naturally has me thinking about fantasy gaming again. Also I needed a break from all the worn-out tech that has been a main feature of my hobby efforts lately (between Necromunda and Gasland).
So, I've been looking at my tray of primered fantasy figures once more, as a palate cleanser and to get back into a rythm of painting again.
Today, I painted a trio of Wraiths. These Wraiths are converted from GW Empire Flagellants and based on the ones found in, unsurprisingly, the Witcher:
 

And here's my interpretation:

These were painted by drybrushing them up to a light grey and then a final drybrush of pale sand. Afther that the colours were added by thin washes/glazes of the GW washes. This gives them the pale and washed out look I needed for them. The Wraith on the right features a first careful, and probably too subtle, attempt at OSL from the lamp/timeglass. The metal parts of the swords (and the brass bell) were given a very light drybrush of metal.

 " Wraiths are spirits of the unquiet dead. Trapped between true life and true death, they are filled with torment and a burning hatred of the living. They can be found roaming catacombs, near their disturbed or neglected gravesites or sometimes drawn to Places of Power. As such an adventurer must always be alert when visiting such locales and never neglect a sudden chill running down their spines, often a first warning sign that Wraiths are nearby...."

 The personal fantasy/dungeoneering setting I'm placing my fantasy skirmishes and dungeoneering projects in is a mix of various factors that interest me. It's a witches'  brew of "traditional" fantasy and folklore, mixed with a good dollop of historical 14th century for the villages/towns and general architecture, and a healthy helping of Cthulhu Mythos for the deep dark places in forests and dungeons, far from the light of civilisation... Nothing set in stone, or even written down, for now it's just a ghost of a dream in my head. But the last few iterations a lot of the Witcher universe and Slavic folkore in general has been spicing the mix.* The more I look into it, the more it intrigues me. It's all just unfamiliar and dark enough to be interesting (to myself and players) as well as form a nice bridge or gradient between the civilised parts of my setting and the truly dark Cthuluesque parts. As a result I'll be adding a few of the monsters and creatures from these settings into my collection, in addition to the Western European folkore and mythology "classics".  I just need to find  good models to represent them or convert them from. I'm even considering painting all the signage and such in Glagolotic instead of Roman/western letters.

*: In fact the Pavesiers/City Guard I painted more than a year ago take their heraldry from Rivia, a small kingdom in the Witcher world....

See you next time! Don't get bitten by a Domovoi!

Geta job!

Job done, that is! 😁

With the help of my lovely wife (and her fabric collection and sewing machine), the geta got finished:

I just need to fidget around with the straps, get them neat, and find out the right length before I permanently attach them.

The wood is  "steigerhout" from a local DIY, which seems to be a low grade of pine. It's light, but not very sturdy, and hard to get really smooth and neat.  I finished it with boiled linseed oil, in the hopes of protecting them from wet and dirt at least a little bit.  The straps are terry cloth wound around sisal rope, held togehter inside a black cotton tube.
These are just a quick test of concept and construction, to see how they would be to walk on. If they work well, and I actually manage to wear these out, maybe I'll make a pair of decent wood. Maybe, someday.

They're a bloody hazard to walk around with on wooden flooring, but on carpet I can manage a (careful and nervous) run. Hopefully I'll get to try them outdoors sometime, the type of terrain they are intended for. We've got some inland dunes nearby so I might get to test them out on both woodland soil, some light mud and loose sand. Plus I get to confuse the locals...

See you next time!

(Not) Doing Stuff....

Heh, my previous post was letting you know I hadn't fallen off the edge of the Earth, and then I go silent for weeks... Sorry, folks!

Anyway, this will be a bit of a non-gaming post. Not entirely unexpectedly, the Muse has still been very erratic and absent for extended periods. At least as far as miniature stuff goes.

You see, this year I've decided to not be just a desk-jockey for the rest of my life, but also do something that I find rewarding and of lasting value on a personal level. To achieve this, I've started on a course for fine woodworking/furniture making. I've always liked wood and wooden articles, and have a life-long urge to make things (hence the wargaming/modelling, occasional bookbinding or other cockamamie project). Where this will go, I'm still undecided, maybe it will be a self-funding hobby, side job or maybe, if I get really lucky, a full time job?  But what creative urge there has been the last few weeks, has often been channeled into woodworking instead of wargaming, especially now that I have a little workspace in the garage.  I'll post some of the stuff I've been working on at the end of this post.

Also, I'm preparing to start a new (temporary) job soon, which means I need to renew certain certifications, leading to lots of studying in the last few days and coming week or two. Once I get that certification, I can start and will spend several weeks of on-the-job training and then a couple of months of certainly busy and probably erratic work. Which also means less or at least, less predictable, time for my various hobbies. On the other hand, all the activity at work may also just re-energize the old mojo-generator, who knows?

Oh, here's those pics of my first few projects I promised:

An Ash shop mallet, the final workpiece of the starter course. It this picture it hasn't had all the plugs and wedges sawn off yet. It has since been cleaned up and oiled and now serves as an excellent half-kilo of "persuasion". :D

 

A meditation bench for my wife. From a non-descript softwood that was a bit unpleasant to work with (Sold as "Scaffolding board", which is a DIY-by-the-numbers fashion item for making rough and ready screw-together furniture, not actually wood sturdy enough to use for scaffolding...). 

It's made to tilt and rock back to front, allowing the user to find the optimal angle of the seat and also forcing one to actively keep ones balance, leading to better posture during meditation. This was my first "solo" project, outside of the course. Made some mistakes (including one that cracked the wood on the legs), but learnt a lot. And the misses really appreciates getting/having it.

Solo project number two, a larch drawer/box. I made it mainly as an excuse to practice making dovetails, and contains my first dovetail joints ever. I'm happy with how neat they are for a first attempt. As that went well, I chose to take a risk and put a decorative butterfly key in the front side, made from oak. It still needs its surface finishing. Currently I'm using it as a sort of tool-tote around the (tiny) workshop. You can see the finished Ash mallet in the background.


What's up next? As money has been tight, a trip to the lumber yard has been out of the question, so I've had to beg and scrounge for my wood. So far this has netted a nice thin plank of walnut and a similar plank of hard maple, which I consider myself very lucky to get as a gift. I will be using these to make a christmas present for my wife. A friend said he had a hardwood pallet (which turned out to be beech, which surprised me). When I came to collect it, he had another surprise for me:

 A disc of Oak! (FYI, I don't have small feet... my shoes are literally a foot long. So you can estimate the size of that disc.)
I'll need to find a way to smooth it and get it to a uniform thickness. The crack in the left side will need to get butterfly keys to stabilise and strengthen it. (It's a total coincidence I chose to try making one in the larch box just a week or two before, but I'm happy I did!) I'm thinking of using the beech from the pallet to make a frame/legs for this slab and turn the whole set of gift wood into a side table. I won't be able to retain the bark, as it has already started to separate in too many places, but it will still end up an interesting shape. There's a wedge of oak to the left of the disk. Once I find suitable wood for legs, this may become a small stool, or if sufficient wood emerges, a taller shop stool to use when doing fine work at the workbench.
I've also been offered the off-cuts/leftovers of some furniture grade pine, but those will have to wait until the owner of the wood finishes his own project first. So no pre-made plans for those.

See you next time!