Arrow Sign Warnings for Gaslands, 40K, Post Apoc etc (28mm)

 These were made as a custom order at Pat's Lasercuttings and paid for by my own money back in October 2021. As usual, took me a while to get going and get shit finished. (basically I found the box while sorting stuff to sell, sat down cause it was warm today and the laundry was running anyway, and finished it all in one go)

Size reference pic:

15mm (well, more 20mm tbh) Grav Van and 28mm GW figure for size reference

I ordered and painted 12 of each direction.Twas a nice afternoon spent and another item scratched off the WIP list. I left the backs plain, no posters or anything. K.I.S.S. and all that.

Clean and ready to be dirtied up

3mm ruins - now with block plates

Took a few minutes today to base up what I have already made, using the lasercut Blockbases.

It is nice to see Patrick lasering what I had in my head a few weeks ago. As soon as I feel safe with a blade again (next week? I hope?) I'll cut more buildings and glue them down.

Got an email from Dom at Dom's Decals that he is a bit behind, and my order should ship soon. I just picked some aircraft that I felt like I wanted to paint and went with that (P-47D's, I-16's, Hs-129's and Japanese floatplanes). Was worried not receiving anything almost 2 weeks after making my order, I found that to be unusual. I'm behind on painting airplanes anyway, but yes, life.

Slowly whittling away the stuff on my battletable, put up quite a bit for sale, the rest sorted in the correct boxes and a bit dropped in the bin.

Other then that enjoying my darkend room and trying not to annoy Kim too much. Did install new light fittings in her aquarium, so I did that much. Her fish are all wearing sunglasses now though......

3mm ruins - Block 4 and 5. And a midnight 6.

Lazy sundayevening.

Block 4

Block 4 from the other side

Block 5. When based, this will get some walls with a doorway to fence the alley off

1,2,3,4,5. We are getting there!

I REALLY need more corner pieces. At least 15 alone for this set if I don't want to be staring at blank walls all the time. As soon as Patrick is back from his trip I'll have a word.

Edit: Could not sleep. Built nr 6

Nr 6

3mm ruins - well, not all of them

When I made the design it was actually to make Cold War Kaserne for a German board. It needed no modification for the ruins. Also nice as a Hopsital or Government building.

In my infinite wisdom, cause I was just going to make ruins, I decided I did not need roofs.....well, do I have egg on my face :) Well, I need bases anyway, and due to a communication mishap with Pat I have hardly any corner buildings and those are pretty essential tbh for my ruins. Can't have a ton of blank walls in the city. Speaking of which, 2 more blocks done.

We are getting there.

3mm ruins - Block 1 basics done

Well, the basic part of Block 1 is done now.

I might add some side supports on the inside, very thin ones, to improve the look a bit, but these are wargames buildings, not museum pieces. Besides, I need to be able to easily fit a 20mm square base in there if I need to.

Simple field test to see if my fingers can reach in there, and I have no problems doing so, so success.

I did see one thing while building them. Look at the following picture to see what I mean.

1. 4 walls
2. 3 walls
3. 3 walls
4. 2 walls
5. 2 walls
6. 2 walls

I noticed I can leave out walls because I will be glueing it all together to make solid blocks anyway, so I'm ending up with a lot more spare parts then anticipated, which in turn means more buildings. I just need to keep cutting down scrap cardboard to fill in the holes, but that is a 2 second job. I also noticed that the top parts that I cut off to trim the size of the building can be easily converted into shopwindows by trimming off the bit inbetween (not in this picture, just in my head right now). I did notice I'll end up short on corner pieces, so some of the blocks will have just blank walls facing the street....but I think I have a nice plan for that as well....we will see, some simple cuts here and there should transform the pieces anyway.

Just dandy really, it is coming along as planned, with some minor alterations to make, and the cardboard is pretty damn tough to cut which is good for the final strength. Patrick will cut bases to fit the various blocks next week or the week after, so I have to wait with glueing them toghether till then. Still, doing one or 2 blocks per evening should not be an impossible task, so in theory I could have them all made up by next weekend-ish.


With that sorted, a bit of a rant from me.

I go through my stuff on a regular basis to find stuff to sell to fund things like this. I take good pictures, properly describe it and ask a fair price (or so I hope). I've noticed a trend for a while now that people ask me "to cut them a deal on postage" which for most EU locations is 12-15 euros. In my kindness (and I really want that deal to put money in the bank) I take off 3-5 euros and make the offer. Only to have people agree with me there and then and then tell me straight away or a day later that they think that another 5-10 euros off or completely free shipping is more fair. I find myself getting more and more annoyed by people doing this over 10-20 euros worth of miniatures....are people just getting more greedy or what is going on here? Even tonight I had 2 people contact me over a lot of lasercut stuff worth 35 euros that I was asking 15 euro for just to get rid of it, only to have one chap make me an offer of 7,50 euros, and then contact me a few hours later saying that he made a shitty offer, and what was my REAL askingprice? When I told him I already had offered it to another chap including shipping, he kept asking me what price I was selling the lot for. When the other guy accepted the offer I told this chap it had sold, and told me that he would not make a higher offer. Which made me look puzzled, as he wasn't in the position to make an offer anyway! Also, I offered up a larger lot of Epic40K stuff on various FB groups that hadn't sold 3 months ago, although I had plenty of interested parties then. Again, some of the same interested parties from last time contacted me with offers that were much, much lower. These were the same persons I had given a previous deal including shipping, and not a single one of them had bothered to reply to that offer. Not even a simple No (common cuortesy seems to have died?). One of those persons was particularly brazen, made the lowest offer of them all, telling me he was being generous and this was the best offer I would get online, and that I had to include free shipping! When I pointed out that he had failed to reply the last time around and because of that I would not deal with him (well, that and the lowball bid), he replied annoyed and abusive. Fortunately for me, a couple of new interested parties did reply to offer including postage that I sent them, most with a request to think about it and one person who accepted the offer almost straight away, and even paid within the hour. I informed everybody else and that was it for me. Don't get me wrong, I offer stuff after checking prices from other sellers and ebay Sold listings, and I don't mind taking lower offers, but don't go telling me what I need to do. It just pisses me off and I will do no more business with you, period.

Maybe it is me and my Aspergers, but I try very hard to be sociable (while I'm not really that good at it), say "thank you" and "you are welcome" a lot, outside to cashiers and people I meet on the street, even online, and for some stupid reason I think normal people should respond the same way. Like this:

The meme should add: "....or a wargamer"

Sometimes it makes me wonder why people call me different or unsociable, while I think they should take a hard look in the mirror cause they are not exactly poster children of proper human interaction (if there even is such a thing as that....considering all the wars, terrorism and crime you'd think there are too many people with a few screws loose now a day).

There, I feel better now.

3mm ruins - the start

This afternoon, I was greeted by the postman who gave me a sturdy little box. Upon opening, I was greeted by the smell of burnt stuff :)

I grabbed the bag of bases and started fiddling about. In my head I have 2x2, 2x3 and 3x3 as base shapes, and I had been playing with paper cut outs, but now I have the real stuff, so after some quick sorting and printing off some sheets of graph paper, I ended up with the following which was more or less what I had in my head, with some additions:

The grey speck is a 20x20mm base with a tank on it. Well, I always knew 3mm would not be as glamorous picture wise as 20mm, and 3mm will be a top down and close up shots for battlereports.  I have enough spare bases to make a 4th row of ruins, plus enough spare bits to make a 5th row of ruins, if I wanted to, but for now, I won't.  The bit above is 55cm x 35cm , but with what is left in the bags I have more than enough to cover half a square metre of table (my basic table is 80x80 cm) so I could do a complete cityfight on it. I'll make the buildings in such a manner that there is plenty of space to put the 20x20mm bases in, though some will be more extensively modelled then others. Bombcraters will be easy too, just some milliput surrounded by scatter. God I love 3mm scale, I can finally put all my dreams to reality without costing me another house in storage, another fortune and my marriage. When I say fortune, I mean it....the money I have spent on wargaming over a lifetime is scary! Fortunately, all this stuff cost me 32,50 euros and a book in trade, so total cost for half a square metre (and then some) in scenery is 45 euros. In 20mm that would buy me maybe 2 houses, in 28mm maybe a single farmhouse (unless I went MDF, then maybe a bit more).

What is the plan? Taking the above picture and gridpaper as a base, I will cut out, round off and sand down 12 bases and feg, there goes my plan. Just checked my stash and I  have only 1 sheet of 2mm plasticcard left, which is only sufficient for the bottom 2 rows, and there are no more local sellers of the stuff so this means back to the lasercutter. Which costs more money. Feg. (my buddy lasercutter is unavailable for the next 3 weeks and he's not the most accurate measuring wise so I won't risk that).

Not a problem. Cause Pat cut all of these with bases I can just assemble them ahead of time and glue them together in the correct shapes so they are ready when the blockbases arrive. See, problem solved. Pffeww.. now this won't happen again when I do the next part, the factories, so lesson learned.


Right, back to the normal routine of cleaning and clearing out all the stuff I don't need anymore from the hobbyroom and selling it. The income for this week alone has been phenomenal, more then a years budget in just 2 sales, but I've put most of it back into my bank account to make it greener as I have been skirting the thin red line and I want to stay out of debt. I have enough left over though for a small 3mm force though :)

Enough for today. Tomorrow, the world! :)

Space is a valuable commodity, Part 2

Remember part 1? space is a valuable commodity

Today, I finished putting together all of the paint racks Patrick from Pat's Laser Cuttings had given me at Poldercon. Turns out Patrick made a slight error in the amount of stuff he had to cut for me so I'm 3 racks short of my full order, but i contacted him straight away, told him what was missing and he is right on, I should receive the missing parts this week or so.  So, with 9 narrow and 2 wide ones built (1 was prebuilt by Patrick to see if he got his calculations correct and was given to me as a freebie) and waiting for the remaining 3, I can show you what a full rack looks like.

9 narrow and 2 wide makes for a perfect fit in a space that doesn't have the bit attached to the door, else I would lose the space for 1 rack, and the 3 remaining ones are spares for later and can fit on another plank if I wanted to. After putting in some paints to test the dimensions, I can happily say that the 9 narrow racks hold 30 paints each (so 270 in total) and the wide racks hold 21 paints each (so 42 in total). With my current paint collection (ignoring all of my Games Workshop for a moment that I hardly ever use anyway) this means I have about 1,5 narrow racks spare and 1 full wide rack. As I plan to buy more Vallejo washes and MiG Ammo weathering painst in the future this gives me all the room I need for a while.

The racks handle easy enough, even when filled to the max, as there is some wiggle room for my finger to grab a rack from the side and then slide it out with no problem. All that is left for me to do is to paint the exposed side gloss white with a extra coat of varnish, and then fire up the labelprinter to print out the paint codes (VMC 1-10 for instance, I have almost the complete set of that series, or just VPA for the few Panzer Aces colours that I own)

Now I can hear you say, I can't see my paints, now I can't just grab the colour that I need right now. Well, good for you, but 9 out of 10 times I'm painting by the numbers dictated by my notebook. I just grab the codes that I need and paint away. If  I do need to experiment, which happens from time to time, I can just slide open a rack and look at the bottles to see what colour I want as that is clearly visible. Just takes a hint of effort, no biggie. And it frees up a ton of space as these 2 paintracks:

...dominated my table space left and right of my monitor. Not that my tablespace isn't dominated by a ton of junk on it, but hey, details. :) Now, I can store almost 300 paints where before I could only fit 100. I'm now another step closer to swapping rooms with the kids. Something, that, due to the termination of my contract, is a lot closer then we had previously planned,

(Gameplan - in 3 weeks time I'm out of a job. To fool my brain and act like I still have a job, I have given myself 2 weeks to clean out my storage space in the city, toss what I can't sell quickly, save the miniatures and rulebooks, and trash everything else including the furniture, or have some guy buy the lot. Not having a storage space to pay for saves me 60 euros a month better spent on other things like a full tank of gas (at current prices) - Also, when that is done I can focus 8 hours a day at cleaning the current hobby room, packing everything up in boxes and moving it upstairs, leaving just the empty cabinets and tables. Then I have to time it for when the girls stay at my parents place for 2 days to get the lot dissasembled, moved out of the way, and the kids stuff moved into this room, and then store the lot in the what will be my new hobby room, so I can start assembling it after the kids come back. Big plans, I know, and in the meantime I have to try and find work as well, but now, if ever, is the best time to get this move done cause I have the time I would not have had, had I still been working. Well, that's how I feel about it anyway. I really want to see this happen asap. Only took me over a year to get there :) The pic has now been printed out as a motivator on my door......

And that is it really. What do you think of it?