Peter Laing 15mm WW1 - The Insanity Continues..........

You may recall I recently acquired an early WW1 painted 15mm Peter Laing collection containing French, German and British forces. Further to this, you may additionally remember that another part of this same collection was in the hands of another member of SEEMS (my wargames club) and had lain unseen in the depths of his shed for many years. This semi-legendary collection has now officially been uncovered and is residing safely in my 'office' aka the Rayleigh Factorium.

The collection consists of two armies - one Russian and one Austrian (not German as originally reported) and are both painted and complete in every way with artillery, machine guns, command groups, cavalry and even some supply wagons and a field hospital complete with stretcher bearers. There is also an armoured car, a Russian Tchanka (the MG on a wagon), a Renault FT 17 (I have no idea why that should be included in a 1914 collection either!) and a pontoon bridge.

This means I now own representative forces for all the major powers for WW1 and the Turks and Bulgarians for 1912. It also means my WW1 project has gone from being merely huge to gargantuan! This latest addition to the collection will need a rebase and and a repaint - the painting standard is fine for the figure quality but it is sloppy, much like the other part. I have no problem tackling either of these tasks although the sheer scale involved in this project is quite intimidating - we are talking around 600 foot and a 100 mounted figures after all. The cavalry present an additional problem in that most (if not all) of the lances will need to be replaced with wire so that will be a huge undertaking on its own - not difficult, just fiddly and time consuming. I have decided on the organisation and basing convention for the figures and this will be uniform across the entire collection. I will experiment on the painting front in respect of whether or not I could get away with either:

• 'Pickling' the figures back to bare metal and starting from scratch.
• Undercoating straight over the figures as they are and then painting them.
• Painting straight over the existing coat.

Obviously the last option will be the quickest and mercifully the detail of the figure is such that any loss due to paint 'thickness' would be barely noticeable. It will be essential that I get the painting technique absolutely right from the start in the interests of both speed and sanity!