HistoriFigs HQ has been buzzing with activity for the past several weeks. Some of the activity has been with casting, mold making and order fulfillment. Some of the activity revolved around equipment repair. And of course it wouldn’t be winter in Wisconsin without snow (and the related snow removal duties).

We’ve also started on a revamp of our various websites. The first site to receive the new treatment is the Blasted Planets site. At first glance the site may not look a whole lot different. However under the hood it is almost all new. For those who care about such things: we shifted from a shtml and javascript approach to a more modern ajax (javascript and jquery) approach. Anyhow, the Blasted Planets site was our most out of date site (from a product listing standpoint) as well as our smallest site; so it was the test subject for our new website design(s). The structure and code aren’t quite what I wanted (but close), so we will continue make adjustments as we work on the Resistant Roosters website.

We have a few more photos to shoot and upload and then we will announce the official launch the new Blasted Planets website as well as a new Blasted Planets contest…

Look for more news and information this coming weekend.

A while back (Thanksgiving weekend) we received an email from long time customer, Gary Zaharek. He was looking for along out of production, 25mm Colonial figure: “25mm Sudan Native advancing w./ shield and short spear held up high” to quote Gray’s email. After a bit of digging we narrowed this down to J-22 (I don’t have the original catalog description for this one and the hunt was on…

Days and weeks rolled by with little luck in locating the original master or any of the original pattern figures. Finally on Saturday morning, after loading the week’s firewood onto the back of the truck, I was able to locate the last two boxes of 25mm Colonial gravity molds (stashed int he corner of the pole barn). I loaded the boxes into the cab of the truck and carried on with the remained of the days chores.

It wasn’t until after dark that I had time to unload the truck (stacking the firewood first) and bring the boxes into the shop. Another hour or so went by while Liam and I were looking over a newly acquired map of the [Warhammer] Old World. With Liam occupied, reading yet another book, I took the next half and hour or so to sort out the contents of the boxes (of gravity molds). I hit the jackpot in the first few minutes of sorting when I uncovered an envelope labeled: “NIP – 25mm Sudanese Native Advancing with Spear and Shield“.   Opening the envelope was even better; This mold had been properly stored as the mold was not empty… Inside was a casting of the object of my search – J-22. The casting was fairly good. The was the usual flash, not too bad and easily cleaned. Since this was an original Scruby casting the metal is a lead alloy, which just made things even easier. Working with actual lead figures makes restoration of details as easy as pie…

OK, more on how I go about restoring these old figures to production in another post. I’ll even try and post the story as a sort of photo essay, so you can better see what I’m wring about.

For now, I’ll leave you with the first picture of J-22:

I now have three boxes of gravity molds for the 25mm Colonial line. The third contains the other lost figures I found while searching for J-22. More on this subject in the coming weeks.

As soon as I have an open slot in a Pattern mold I’ll start the process of adding J-22 to a production mold and will return what Gary refers to as “…the best of Jack’s  Sudan native figures…” to production.

The end of 2010 is almost here…

This year has been an interesting one to say the least. Not a lot of excitement around here, but not a lot of much else either. Real-life took a goodly portion of my time this past year, so we didn’t get to complete as many new projects as we wanted to. We will work hard in 2011 to make up for the lack of new releases in 2010. Not sure what all we will release, but we do have plenty of goodies to bring back into production as well as some new figures to release…

As previously mentioned we have some ‘lost’ 25mm Scruby figures to release in January. We also have some ‘new’ Blasted Planets figures nearing completion. The Bloodaxe line will see some new WWII Germans as well as some Spanish to go with our Moro Rebellion range…

Next time I’ll post some early pictures of some of the releases we are working on. In the meantime here is one more picture from the upcoming Early Napoleonic release:

J-144 – Italian, Cisalpine Republic, 1799, on guard

Pictures took a little longer than planned (weekend and holiday season madness)…

I’m still fiddling with how best to prepare figures for photography, so these still are not what I’d like, but they do show the figures.

J-50 - Boer infantryman, standing on guard

J-51 - Boer infantryman, standing, firing

J-52 - Boer infantryman, walking, rifle at trail

J-53 - Boer soldier (artillery/utilityman)

JC-54 - Boer rider, firing from saddle

JC-55 - Boer rider, holding rifle on thigh

Our next “Lost Figures” release will be: 25mm Early Napoleonic Soldiers

I’ve located masters for the following figures:

J-143 – Bavarian Musketeer, 1799, on guard

J-144 – Italian, Cisalpine Republic, 1799, on guard

J-147 – Russian Musketeer, 1794, on guard

JC-148 – Russian Cuirassier rider, 1794

J-149 – De Meuron’s Swiss (in light dragoon helmet), 1800, standing firing

J-150 – Hardy’s York Fusilier, 1800, advancing

And now for a sneak peek:

J-143 - Bavarian Musketeer, 1799, on guard

Look for these Napoleonic figures in January.

I’ve been hinting at our next release of “Lost Scruby Miniatures” and now I can finally announce the availability of our 25mm Boer Soldiers. I’ve been wanting to release these for some time now, but couldn’t find the original masters and reworking the figures was very time consuming, so the project just never got done. Last month I was searching for some other masters and found the original master figures for all but one of the 25mm Boer soldiers (the lone missing master is JC-54 – which I have recreated using an original gravity mold) . Even with the original masters there was till some work to be done. First JC-54 had to be remastered from an original pattern mold. Next In order to cast J-52 I had to cut the master into castable sections. Cutting JC-54 turned out to be far easier than I expected, as I was able to disassemble to master at all of the original joints (left arm and right hand). As a result this is now a 3 piece model that you will need to assemble.

And now on to the figure listing. Our figure listing is taken from the 1967 Scruby Catalog:

25mm Boer Soldiers, 1899

The Boer soldier of the Republican armies of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State was purely a citizen, without uniform or pay and with no parade-ground training. “Whether opposed by man or beast, his sole weapon was the rifle which he grew up with, and he preferred to keep his distance, neither using a bayonet nor believing in the heroics of man-to-man struggle. He kept his pony close to the scene of the action so that he could simply run away if things got too hot – and live to fight another day.” (From: ‘Good Bye Dolly Gray’) “Almost all Boer officers were elected, but every burgher was equal, entitled to give advice and participate in councils of war.”

These two descriptive paragraphs should give the war game player some ideas on how to use his Boers in war games against the British. Below you will find a listing of the 25mm scale Scruby Miniatures of these famed fighters which, with the proper (rules to consider their peculiar fighting ability), should make for some interesting battles – whether using the Boers against the British, or using a ‘Boer Commando’ within the framework of your present African War (or Mafrica War) miniatures armies.

You will find it fun to paint these Boer soldiers too, since they wore all kinds of clothing and did not wear uniforms. The Scruby castings are clothed much as the man swinging his rifle is, in the illustration above. One should remember too that although every Boer was mounted, they always fought on foot, so a judicious choice of our models can give you the correct figures to represent this – for example, one mounted man as a horse holder, several horses, and several foot fighters could be mounted on a moving try to give the idea of ‘movement’ on horseback, and fighting on foot.

If all goes as planned (no snow/blizzard expected) I’ll have photos to post early next week.