Reaper Bones - my first look

I'm a sucker for miniatures. I buy all sorts that I know that I will probably never actually use in a game. I'm also kind of a cheapskate — admittedly, a cheapskate with poor impulse-buying control, but nevertheless.

I suppose it's because when I first started buying gaming figurines, they tended to cost less than a buck apiece, and figures designed especially for wargaming were often as low as 20 cents. That makes modern metal figures seem very, very expensive to me, and when it comes to companies like Games Workshop, ludicrously expensive.

Reaper Miniatures have a very extensive range, mostly of pretty good quality, and for a 21st century company, their prices are fairly reasonable. You're still looking at six to ten yankee dollars for a 25-28mm metal figure though, which is a lot when you want to buy a whole horde of orcs or something.

They've recently started producing much cheaper plastic versions of some of their range. The plastic figure range is called Bones, and I decided to try them out. I bought 3 of the Great Worm (77006), Rats (77016 — you get 6 in a pack), and 5 packs of Kobolds (77010 — also 6 to a pack).

The figures are made of a white polymer of some kind, which is bloody hard to photograph effectively. The Rats and Kobolds, shown here, I eventually laid on the platen of my scanner to get an image that didn't blow out the highlights.

The detail appears a bit softer than I'd expect from metal figures, but to what extent that's due to the modelling, and how much to the nature of the medium I don't know. The detail on the Great Worm (below) looks a lot sharper, but then it's also a much larger figure.

The kobolds, by B. Siens, have been mastered in quite flat poses, which tends to be a feature of injection-moulded plastic figures due to the issues the process has with undercuts — attaining a well-rounded, dynamic figure often requires some pretty tricky multi-part mould-making, and that (of course) increases the production cost.

The Rats are by Sandra Garrity, and are pretty good; the proportions and the three poses provided are suitably ratty.

The Great Worm is decently monstrous, and it's with really large figures like this that you stand to save a LOT of money. It costs $US2.99 in plastic, and I doubt that you'd get much change from three or four times that amount if it were made in metal — plus it would weigh a ton, and that means paying extra freight as well.

Reaper say that you can slap paint straight on Bones figures without undercoating, and I certainly didn't have any trouble with the Vallejo acrylics that are my preferred paints these days.

Of the Bones figures I have thus far, I've only painted the Great Worm, shown here with an old WotC metal figure (circa 2001, I think) for scale. The Worm does stand on its own moulded base, but it's slightly out of balance, and I glued it to a honking great steel washer for the sake of stability.

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I'm pretty happy with what I've seen of the Bones range so far. I don't think metal figures are going to disappear overnight, but I do think they're going to be reduced to more of a niche market within the next few years, if only because of their expense. A cheaper alternative like these allows me to buy more figures, which means I can throw larger hordes of mooks at my players, and that can't be a bad thing.

Yet another little table

 One of the things we're learning about a 'tech at the moment is veneering. It can be fiddly stuff to work with; the standard commercially available stuff is less than a millimetre thick, and some timbers (hardwoods, especially) tend to split very easily under the knife. It's not generally terrifically difficult though, as long as you take a bit of care and don't try to go too fast.

The timbers in this piece are cedar (I think), rimu, kauri, mahogany, black walnut, rewarewa, and the body of the table is made from pink birch.

And here's the veneer in all its mostly symmetrical glory.

Get Big Dick!

The Passing of an Era

I'm getting old and staid, and more concerned with comfort than cool, so the time has come for me to sell off my trusty steed. It's a 1994 Yamaha XJR1200 with only 77,147 km on the clock.

At the moment it's not warranted, and the registration is suspended. It will probably need a new back tyre for its next warrant, otherwise it's fine.

I'm looking for $3,500 for it, as is, where is. If I have to take care of the warrant and rego myself, I'll be adding another grand to that.

NOTE: Unless you're in Christchurch, NZ, this is probably going to be of little interest to you, since shipping it anywhere else is bound to bump the price up ridiculously.

Hitchins

Conehat

I painted this little acrylic (about 150 x 150 mm) for Annette back in '07. It has no hidden meaning.

Opus Completus

Observe the Coffee Table of DOOOOOOOOM!!!

Complete at last, and weighing in at about a gajillion kg. Observe also the Super-Secret Hidey-Hole that nobody would ever find in a million years (unless they looked at it).

The oak has been finished with three coats of Liberon Finishing Oil, which (though expensive) I really like, and a coat of wax on top. It took a great deal of rubbing and sanding and rubbing again, and then more work with steel wool and more oil, and so on and so on.

There's no real reason why this piece of furniture shouldn't last a thousand years and more. It bloody well better had.

Work In Progress

My latest opus is an oak coffee table with two push-through drawers and a central well in the top for putting stuff in, or for cats to climb into and have their photos taken and be splattered all over the internet for cat-lovers to go "Awwwwwwww!" over.

All that remains now, apart from a little bit of tidying up, is to attach the top (which is a very hefty lump of oak indeed), and to think about what I'm going to do for drawer handles.

It's been an interesting project, and I've learned lots of ways to make things much harder for myself than they really needed to be.

Tyres

I don't know who made this. If you know, please let me know. It's fantastic.




Edit: Thanks to the excellent search-and-find skills of  Annette (of Nut and Bee fame), it is revealed that it is by Stefano Bombardieri. Hoorah!

Doodleriffic!

Bah, Humbug

There is so a spoon, Neo

I forgot to take a spoon with me to 'tech today, to eat my lunch with.

So I made one.

It's oak, American White Oak to be precise.

Bookcase

My latest oeuvre, a little pine adjustable bookcase, seen here in the process of being oiled up with boiled linseed oil.

It almost certainly won't be used for storing books though. It's intended to accommodate some of Annette's knick-knack overflow, so that she has somewhere to keep the stuff she isn't displaying right at the moment.

I have still to install a catch for the cupboard door.

Recent scribbling

As you are probably aware by now, you can click on the pictures to see larger versions.

What could possibly go wrong?

That's just 80 kilos or so of mince in waiting. I don't really see this catching on.

But will it do the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs?

For the first time in my life, I have a car of my very own. And for almost the first time in my life, I'm driving a car to get myself from place to place. I've been a motorbike boy pretty much forever, but now that I'm getting geriatric, riding a bike in the freezing cold sleet and rain is a lot less appealing, and I also now have a need for more cargo capacity than a motorbike can provide.

It's an automatic 1995 Nissan Lucino (which is, as far as I can tell, just a foreign name for a Pulsar/Sentra).

Within 30 minutes of buying it, I had already smashed in the front left guard, owing to my extreme incompetence at reversing in anything other than a straight(ish) line. Fortunately, a replacement panel from the wreckers only cost about fifty bucks. Unfortunately, it's a different colour — about as different a colour as it would be possible to be. It's white, and I'm thinking that rather than try to match the existing paint I might just paint it plaid or paisley or something. Frankly, I very much doubt that it will be the last dent-replacement this car will have.

I've always been faintly (sometimes not-so-faintly) contemptuous of cars, calling them "street zeppelins" and the like. But I have to say, I'm rather enjoying driving this one.

Head

Graphite, A5.

Wash Experiment

Playing with my watercolours

And sometimes it's not a cigar

What can this dream possibly mean, doctor?

In Living Colour

Colourized version of the last.

End-of-year doodling

Happy 2012, everyone. Hope it's a good one.

Indefinitely Detained

From Tom the Dancing Bug (Ruben Bolling)

Bedside Essentials

The NookDroid and android phone (it's a Huawei X5) have pretty much made the ipod touch and the migear ebook reader redundant, but I keep them around for the same reason that I hardly ever throw anything away.

Pity I don't play

This is the result of my latest project from 'tech — a little side-table with a parquetry chessboard veneered into its top. The body of the thing is pink birch, and the chessboard is kauri and black walnut with a pine surround. The brass handle was kind of a pain in the arse to inset; it's not perfectly square and the hole that had to be dug out to seat it was a bit of a trial, but it was achieved in the end.

I'm pretty pleased with it, really. Alas, I don't play chess.

Oh, that paddle-shaped thing underneath is just a little cheeseboard I turned up out of pine as a learning exercise. I'm not a wholly confidant wood-turner, but that worked out OK. Wood-turning is trickier than I had expected.

Passing the time with pencils and pens

Umbrella tree.

That chap in the background
must find his hat quite unmanageable
in anything of a breeze.

Library expansion

Behold the glory!

Having had to shift everything in the house around due to EQC repairs, I've taken the opportunity to build some new bookshelves to house some of the books that have been living in teetering piles all over the house for the last twenty years and more. These shelves won't cope with all of them, but they should make a significant dent.

I've made sets of shelves before, but then I had to do all the housing joints by hand, with a tenon saw and chisel. Now I have a router and a drop-saw, and everything is much more precise. It's a pity the timber is such shit; it's all 19mm cuttings-grade pine from Bunnings. It has the virtue of convenience of supply, and that's about it.

Why is that, Leon?

Steven Fry Is My Hero

Fitzus Me Fecit, MMXI

I made this little X-legged table as a learning project in my joinery/cabinetmaking course. The wood is pink birch, quite an attractive tropical hardwood (and the product of sustainable forestry, so Not Evil like a lot of other tropical timbers), and the central section is formica-covered laminated MDF.

It's the perfect size for sitting at on a bolster or in seiza on the floor, and I think I'll get a lot of use out of it. It's very, very sturdy, and could easily double as a stool too.

I'm really enjoying this course; I like working with wood, and I just love making stuff.

Eyes Sewn Shut

Painter VIII, charcoal-and-chalk 3-tone method

Patriotism In Action

Patriotism, they say, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I hate them

Majestic Chin

Found this doodle in amongst a bunch of old lecture notes.
It must have been a bit of a dull lecture.

Serpens

Go here to see a remarkable series of photographs of snakes in a black box. I find something strangely fascinating about them; the patterns and colours are beautiful, and I guess there's the frisson of all those millions of years of evolution telling me to stay the fuck away from snakes.

I actually rather like snakes.

Your kitty-kat is PURE EVIL

This is what your cat looks like underneath all that cute fluff. EVIL!!!

Yeah Baby!

Now that's classy.

Winter Weekend 2011

August 7th, 2011. Almost home-time. Photo credit: Diana Bidwell.

I had a good time, but because I was a late arrival I had to settle for a second-storey bunk (no ladder!). Surprisingly, there was no hilarious drunkenness-related bunk slapstick, but I did twist and strain my knee climbing out on the last morning. Ow! Lesson learned; it's clearly very important to limber up before getting out of bed.

About five minutes after this photo was taken it started snowing fit to bust, whereupon almost everyone bailed out before they got snowbound.

David Mitchell - Unusually Smart-Looking Men

Installation

Today, our nice new wetbacked woodburner is being installed. Our 90 year old hot water cylinder made the tradesmen make sad faces, but they are toiling manfully to make everything work. Alas, it looks like the niche where the burner sits is about 20mm too narrow for legality, so I'll have to tile the walls around the fire or something so that the inspector doesn't drag me off to gaol by the heels.

So anyway, as a side effect we have no water supply just at the moment. And I am busting to go to the toilet.

Important Realisation! (Not really)

I have no idea why I was thinking about this today, but I was, so I'll blurt it out here on to the internet:

I realised today that although I've often been frustrated by Microsoft products, and sometimes been angered by their corporate bastardry, I've never felt as personally offended by MS as much as by Steve Jobs' and Apple's contemptuous condescension.

Butterfly Knot

Building these symmetrical knotwork designs is pretty easy, and rather meditative. Animorphics are much, much harder.

Squeeeee! Dwarves!

Photo by James Fisher

First look at some of the Dwarves' costume design for The Hobbit. JED BROPHY as Nori, ADAM BROWN as Ori and MARK HADLOW as Dori.

I am SO looking forward to this movie, if only to see how they fuck around with the story to make it ZOMGMOVIE. Thank goodness it isn't being made by Michael Bay (though that does raise a few interesting mental images).

Better than

Steampunkery Ahoy!

Tom Banwell makes these things. Also other things in a similar vein. I like these things that Tom Banwell makes.