Operation Pickelhaube Part 2

 I shocked that this particular project has been on the back-burner since MAY 2018! What the heck have I been doing? 😕😂

Just to recap, this is part of my Franco-Prussian War 1870-71 (Wikipedia link) war-gaming set and is the first of three North German Confederation infantry 'regiments', this being soldiers of The Kingdom of Prussia...

Above: The uniform I'm going for for this peg regiment is the middle
illustration, which I believe is 'Infantry of the Line'.

Now, when I left off I had just made the basic peg body and I have created a set of simple bowl shapes out of Milliput putty for the distinctive Prussian helmets (pickelhaube). All I had to do to finish these was to attach the front and rear peaks, but that's where the project went into a hiatus!

Fast forward to 2020 and I dusted off my little Prussian pegs and got the project rolling again. To begin with, though, I wanted to get these little chaps into formation which meant creating a magnetised unit base for them...

The MDF bases I bought for this project have small holes already cut into them so you can fit 4mm diameter (2mm depth) magnets into them. So, it was simply a case of super-gluing the little round magnets into the holes on the unit base and the holes in the round figure bases to have a nice wooble-free and easily transportable unit.

One this I would say is that I always set my magnets up in a specific polarity, to do this I have a magnet glued to a lolly stick with 'THIS WAY UP' written on it so that all my magnets face the same way. 

Anyway, moving on...

Originally I had it in mind to simply add a couple of half-moon shaped pieces of wood (cut from lolly sticks) to act as the peaks of the helmets BUT this didn't really work out for me. When you look at the real pickelhaube your notice that the peaks don't really stick out and are more flush with the front and back of the head...

My wooden peaks stuck out too much - and yes I know my figures are a bit cartoony so you will be saying 'whats does it matter as long as it's sorta similar', well, it kinda mattered to me (OCD kicks in)...

AND SO...

I did an about turn and decided to sculpt the peaks from Milliput putty, and here's the result (before the putty hardened and any cleaning up was done)...

These rough peaks will be sanded and shaped to look more like my reference photo, but this once again brings up an issue which has niggled me for a while - that of how to make repeatable complex shapes for my peg soldiers?

Carving of sculpting each individual hat or other item of equipment for half-a dozen of more soldiers is a bit of a pain in the posterior. It was monotonous and time consuming enough just doing this six and I don't want to spend all my time making little hats or whatever, can you imagine just how much time that would add up to when creating a complete war game army! Yikes! 😲

I'm going to have to put some serious thought into how I tackle this issue in the future. To be fair, I've already mulled the problem over a bit and my first thought was that I should purchase a resin casting set so I can make moulds of certain parts so I can build up a stock of items and thus make unit construction a quicker process. But this is 2020, after all, and resin casting seems a bit passe! LOL

So, maybe it;s finally time I get with the 21st century and buy myself a little 3D printer? Hmmmmm... (To be continued.)