Timely Arrivals and a Milestone

I arrived home yesterday evening (at my usual time of 7:35pm) to a welcome package from Stonewall Miniatures. Contained therein were the missing ships from mt 1/2400th WW1 collection including some Orion and Revenge class battleships, a Lion class battle cruiser and, to make up the minimum order required, a Hipper class cruiser from WW2. The castings need a little attention - specifically the Orion class as I will have to remove the rather awkward tripod foremast. I have removed the masts from all of my models for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they never seem to come out cleanly (to be fair the moulds are getting on a little) and secondly for gaming purposes they tend to get in the way. I realise that for C in C and GHQ these are included but they make for a fragile model - at least for me they do - and anyway, the Panzerschiffe types do not seem to have any and the Stonewall models will need to fit in with them from an aesthetic perspective.

Mention of the Hipper will probably give a small clue as to where the collection will be heading once the WW1 models are completed - and for the record the casting is very nice indeed. She will be accompanying my previously painted model of the Bismarck on a foray into the North Atlantic at some point in the future.

I managed to make a start on the bases for the British battleships but did not get very far before tiredness kicked in so I opted to stop for fear of messing something vital up!

I noticed as well that I have managed to pass 250,000 page views - this is a quite astonishing achievement and so my humble thanks go out to everybody that follows my ramblings or that just drops by from time to time. I am coming up to the fifth anniversary of the blog so an average of 50K per year is pretty good going. I am conscious though that my blogging has slowed down somewhat due to work over the last year but many thanks to all for your continued support - it is, as ever, hugely appreciated.