Dirty Dragoons, Dapol church & ECW25.

With the family (wife, 3 daughters and 2 Grand daughters) away to Brighton for a few days this week I have been able to make good progress on the ECW front. Having put together the Dapol Country Inn last week I thought I would tackle the Church. I had seen it on 'Strykers' Hinton Hunt blog and read his account of putting the kit together so decided to do mine. It was definitely more of a struggle than the previous kit, and as in Ian's case I ended up with a few gaps that will need to filled before painting, but overall it's a very nice little model, slightly underscale for 25mm but I was keen to avoid huge model buildings for this project and they fit the retro theme nicely. I still have three of the thatched cottages and a second Inn kit to do, the latter will become a country manor house.

I took delivery of another Horse unit yesterday from Ian Hinds, this time a Dragoon regiment. As previously it arrived quite dirty, but I know that with a good clean up some excellent painting skills emerge so I'm not letting that put me off. Looking through the Hinds Figures ECW lists I also picked out two more units obviously by the same skilled painting hand as previous purchases and they are now on their way to me, another 24 Horse. All will get the usual clean up and rebasing before joining the ranks of my collection, I must now try to resist buying more as the total number of painted cavalry will be 145 with the new arrivals!

Amazing what emerges after a good clean!

Ooh shiny!

Having been looking for a source of 'Clubmen' I also took the opportunity to purchase a unit of 18 painted Minifigs as Hinchliffe never made these, but more on these in due course.

On the infantry front I now have 5 completed Regiments of pike and shot, all the pike blocks have now been increased to 12 figures in 3 ranks with command standing in front, the muskets varying from 16 to 24 per regiment. This gives me nice big units ideal for WRG rules where 1 figure represents 20 men. The largest so far is this Red Regiment totalling 39 figures and I really like the mass appeal and the depth of the pike block.

The Blue pike block featured in my last post required 4 more pikemen to bring it up to 12. I had ascertained that the casting was ECW25 'Pikeman charging' which was not a code I had in my old collection. The base tells me that this sculpt was made in 1980, a couple of years after the bulk of the range was made by Peter Gilder in 1978. It's clearly by a different hand but fits well with the earlier sculpts and I note that several of the latter codes have the same slightly chunkier look to them. I'm keen to find out more about this and would welcome any information on the subject, I think a good starting point will be to look into Peter Gilders history to see what he was doing with the range between 1978 and 1980.

I'm currently focusing on building up the artillery before returning to more Foot.

Stop press! The figures referred to above just arrived and once again I'm blown away by the quality. The hand painted flag is exceptional and I take my hat off to the artist who painted it, it clearly is the same hand as others in my collection. Not much to do with these beyond re basing to match, possibly a slight touch up of the flag bearer.