Bicarbonate of Soda

 As an alternative to the unobtainable textured stone effect spray paint, I have turned to a common household chemical.

My companion for the weekend mentioned that one of her work colleagues had recommended mixing bicarbonate of soda with water based paint as a way of producing textured ceramic style surfaces on cheap vases. I have no idea why that piece of information was shared with me, which I suppose is an indication that I wasn't paying much attention. But, my subconscious was obviously stirred regardless and I made a mental note.

I mixed a suitable shade of grey from some cheap black and white tubes of acrylic and whopped in some bicarb until it looked a bit grainy. Once dry it does indeed produced a textured surface exactly as claimed. I'm not sure that my efforts would produce a very satisfactory item of home decor, but for what I wanted it worked well enough. I won't include a photo, because the ones that I took don't really demonstrate the textured effect. They do show that my carefully mixed paint dried quite a lot darker than it was when I applied it. Still, what's done is done; we shall just have to imagine that half the castle is in the shade.

I wish I had known this a year ago; it would have saved me a lot of money.

Round that corner

 I've had a few days off from wargames related activity because the weather has been rather good. "Surely," I hear you say, "good weather is spraying weather?". Indeed you would think so, but no. While my back was turned the can of paint has dried up, clogged up and generally given up. But the really annoying part is that there appear to be no replacement cans to be had in the UK for love nor money. I don't know what to make of this: it could be related to leaving the EU; it could be something to do with ships stuck in canals; or the colour could have been discontinued for ever (*). For the time being I shall brood on it without doing anything, and hope that something turns up.

On a more positive note I have produced some more Square Bashing tokens, and this time I have manage to produce rounded corners. This might seem trivial, but every time I have made a gaming aid on the laser cutter so far I have intended the corners to be rounded, but they never are. It's easy to design it that way in the CAD package, but until now impossible to port across into the machine code. I am still not entirely clear how I managed it this time - Ungrouping and Breaking Apart may or may not have been involved, whilst Changing Objects to Paths almost certainly was - but I'll take the win.

You may recall that I had even less success in trying to use heat to bend some German model railway scenic material. I can report that it cuts much more easily, and takes glue without any problem. What was I thinking? I shall give more details of what it is when I have finished it.

* Anyone else pissed off about Listerine Original?

Frangas, Non Flectes

 Well, the heat gun didn't either maim me or burn the workshop down. Instead it was the material which defeated me. The arc to which I wished to bend it was too tight to do so without it snapping. So back to the drawing board.

To fill the time I made some tokens for Square Bashing from laminated acrylic. I bought a set from Warbases quite a while ago, which are solid, tactile, perfect in every way except that once they are on the table you can't read them. In Warbases' defence the ones that I have made are too expensive to make commercial sense; or possibly any sense for me to make them either.

Here's some YouTube advice on reforming rigid foam using heat, which I would have done well to have watched before I started:

PotCIVpouri

 I had intended to carry on writing in yesterday's post, after the gratuitous smutty limerick, answering some questions that no one has yet asked. But the force was weak with me; perhaps because I am prostrated with grief. Which I suppose leads to the first question: what did you really think of HRH The People's Racist? I shall simply say that I respect and honour all those who fought against fascism, and leave it at that.

What I was going to write about yesterday was the other question not on anybody's lips: what's happening with the siege games? Well, I have been mulling it over and have decided that the way to make the game quicker is to put more forces on the table. There is some serious logic behind this counter-intuitive conclusion and will share it with you, dear readers, as soon as I set a new game up.

In the meantime, I have been making some more siege and fortress guns. These require more crew and this time I have gone for Kennington Miniatures (sold by SHQ of course), just by way of a change. 

It being April 12th I once again have access to the workshop in which I do much of all this stuff. That's the laser cutter shrouded in the orange cloth at the back. The red sheet in the foreground is some laminated acrylic, on which there will be more to report in due course I hope. Today's task is to use the heat gun to mould some Sturktur-Hartschaum. These are a tool and a material new to me, so either I shall return in triumph with photographs of a magnificent new addition to my Vauban fortress, or I shall burn my hands so badly that I shall never be able to type again.

Valete.

PotCIIIPouri

 Well, here we are, April 11th, and there's a blizzard outside. On top of which the radio appears to have been hijacked by North Korea and is paying non-stop tribute to Kim Jong Phil, who has apparently left us at a tragically young age. 

Young people undertaking their Gold Award expedition

When I was last here it was for a book review. Trebian, over at Wargaming for Grown-ups, has now reviewed the same book, and it seems to have not gone down terribly well. I think our overall conclusions aren't that different - read the book, but make sure that it's someone else's copy - but for once I have been outintemperated (*). A suspiciously large part of his beef with the book seems to be that Dr Lewis hadn't read his (Graham Evans' aka Trebian's) book on Edgecote/Edgcote. I have read it and can confirm that it is a lot better than Dr Lewis' book, but if anyone genuinely thinks that 'Medieval Combat' is the worst book they've ever read then I can only suggest that they are not reading enough books.

According to obituaries that I have seen - not one of which, by the way, mentions the fact that he arranged the murder of Princess Diana - Baron Greenwich didn't have that problem, and in fact owned 11,000 books including many of poetry; so props to him. I am proud to say that this blog can exclusively reveal his favourite poem from among that large collection, one that befits both an old salt like him and this poignant moment in our nation's history:

There was a young sailor from Brighton

Who said to his girl "That's a tight one"

She exclaimed "Bless my soul

You're in the wrong hole

But there's plenty of room in the right one."

* This is definitely a word.

Medieval Military Combat

 I have been reading 'Medieval Military Combat' written by Tom Lewis and recently published by Casemate. In case you don't want to read any further, I'm going to give it 3 stars: not bad, worth a read, borrow rather than buy if you can.

The recently published military history that I have read all seems to have been lacking a proof reader. By way of a change, Dr Lewis could have done with an editor; someone to mould his arguments into a better structure and chop out all the repetition. He also needed someone to point out the weakness in claiming to be setting right widely held misconceptions about a quite niche subject, namely that a lot of those interested and motivated enough to read the book won't actually have those misconceptions in the first place. So, he comes to the conclusion that there weren't as many combatants or casualties at Towton as the chroniclers of the time said. Indeed. And he reveals that a fully harnessed man at arms could probably only have fought for about ten or fifteen minutes at a time because it was such hard work. Quite so.

Anyway, that aside, he is quite clear on the direction from which he approaches things. Although an  academic he is not a historian, but rather had a career in the Australian armed forces (he finds room to tell us on several occasions that he served in Iraq), has lots of experience of relevant(ish) fighting techniques such as fencing and riding, and has observed and interviewed re-enactors at length on the physical aspects of what they do. He has mashed all this together, read the secondary sources extensively - the bibliography is good - and with an added dash of Inherent Military Probability has laid down how he thinks it worked. It might be right, it might not, but it makes one think.

Despite the title, and subtitle come to that, this is mainly a book about the man at arms wearing plate armour and fighting on foot, and is none the worse for that. He believes it likely that they would have operated in a less formal version of the triplex acies used by the Romans during the Punic Wars, relieving each other in the front line turn and turn about, thus allowing them to fight for longer periods. It's certainly plausible, but he doesn't have anything specific to support it beyond the fact that it seems logical to him and, as he points out, the commanders would all have studied Vegetius. 

As I said at the top, it's worth a read.