Well, it may not be a big deal for some, but for Liam it sure is!
Yep, here we are the 15th of November and it is snowing – almost an inch on the ground as I write this. Finally, got Liam to come in for a story and to go to bed. He is so excited about his first snowfall, that it was hard to get him to come in – he was out in the dark and was getting cold but he didn’t even notice until he came and realized that his hands were cold. Being 4 has its advantages!

It has been getting colder here, last night I was out in the shop and it was downright cold – good thing we got a heater for the shop – not a final solution, but it should get us through this first winter here. And without it, I would never get Alison to work on the colder days!

Production is starting again, we are still very slow and really backed up, but some small orders have headed out the door.

Work has begun on a new website – well, more than one site. I have few things I’m looking at. I expect to launch a new site for our Custom Casting service within the week. Our main website is also undergoing renovation. After all we have only 13 months until we need to start the big celebration. What celebration, you might ask. Well, the answer is easy – 50 years of Scruby Military Miniatures! It was 1957 when Jack Scruby launched his Military Miniature business, and we are planning some big celebrations for the year 2007. We have ideas, but if you have any, please pass them along!

Now, to get closer to current times, we are looking at how we want to structure things for 2006. Right now, we are looking at putting a strong emphasis on the larger scale figures (40mm and 54mm). We will keep the smaller, wargame scales active, but will be changing production and shipping policies – we have come to realize that we just cannot keep up with orders for these figures due to the amount of work involved. Many of the molds are nearing or reaching the end of the line. It takes much more time to coax “good” figures out of the molds. We are working on new molds, but with many hundreds of molds, it takes time and money to replace them, so we will need to schedule and prioritize the work. The larger figures have been out of production for too long, so we want to put a little extra effort into bringing these back into production. Our Custom Casting service has been successful enough that we now have a little extra capital for the new molds (as well as a few new projects). SO why not strike while the iron is hot?

As we begin to firm up plans for the coming year we will share them with you here in the News and with a traditional mailing closer to the end of the year. We think you will like where we are steering the ship…

Sadly, there hasn’t been much activity over on the TableTopTalk website…

So, in an attempt to remedy that situation, I’ve posted two new articles. The first covers some ideas for Zulu War games (In the Table Top Talk section). The second is painting tips for Zulu War troops (in the Modeler’s Corner section).

Why not pop over and take a look!

Back from Rock Con and I must say that Rock Con has been my best convention experience this year. Very friendly folks, and the convention organizers went way beyond the call of duty. Hats off to the Rock Con staff!

I finally got to meet some of my “online” friends. Folks such as Mark Severin – Scale Creep Miniatures and the Deep Fried Happy Mice website . A nice fellow online as well as in person. Good to finally meet him face-to-face.

Another group of folks are members of the Old School Wargamers (OSW) group on Yahoo. I was pleased to meet group founder, Patrick Lewis and his wife Linda. Other OSW members in attendance were Bill Protz and Jim Purky. Bill and Jim put on a fine SYW game in the Old School style, more about this in another post… I am looking forward to seeing (and wargaming) these fine people again at conventions or perhaps at one of our homes.

While on the subject of Old School Wargamers, if you have a passion for the older styles of figures and wargame rule, you should check out the group on Yahoo: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/old_school_wargaming/

To borrow, from Patrick’s writing on the groups home page – “Are your wargaming figures older than your children? Do you still hold H. G. Wells, Featherstone, Scruby, Grant, Young, Morschauser, Wise et al. in high regard? If so, then this is the place for you!”

The group is populated with some of the nicest folks you will find anywhere!

Well, that’s all for now.

Just a quick update concerning email to (and from) HistoriFigs…

Recently we have had very large numbers of messages coming in the can be classified as nothing more than spam. In an effort to combat this flood of – junk – I have tightened our spam filtering settings. We hope that we don’t filter out your messages, but there is a chance that a “real” message could get filtered out…

So, when send email to us here at HistoriFigs HQ, please be sure to use one of our standard email addresses:

When we had a high-speed internet connection, we would filter after downloading form the server, but now that we are back on dial-up service we need to take more aggressive steps on the server, before downloading.

You may also notice that it is taking a little longer to respond to your email messages – this too is due to the fact that we are back on dial-up service. We are working to streamline our operations, so we can get faster turn around on email, so please be patient…

You may be asking why we have dial-up rather than high-speed service – Well, the answer is easy, high-speed service is not available where we live. We are looking into high-speed via satellite, but this is rather costly, so it will be a while before we can make that investment.

Well, that about does it for now – Tomorrow is my day at Rock-Con – hope to see you there!

Well, here we are – 1st of November 2005…

So, what’s new here at HistoriFigs?

Things are still progressing slowly on the shop construction and restart of full production. We had really hoped to be getting back up to speed more quickly, but there is just a lot more to do than I had anticipated. Right now, I don’t see that we can do a full restart of operations until at least 1st December 2005. We are working away on the few orders and such that have come in over the past month, so pleas be patient.

We are also still having problems with [snail] mail being forwarded to our new address (which for now is the house, but we will have a new P.O. Box address in the near future). So, if you sent us anything in the mail – we have not yet received it. I will be asking my daughter to stop by the Post Office in Cotati and pick up any mail that may still be sitting in the box and forward it to us. In the meantime Alison is working on the the postal service to get things forwarded.

Next up on my calendar is Rock-Con this coming weekend. I am looking forward to Saturday, the one day that I can attend. Also looking forward to meeting some of the folks whom I have only met online. I have a feeling that Saturday will be a busy one – but fun and relaxing none-the-less.

On the wargaming front, I’m starting to plan a solo SYW campaign game for the winter months – not sure where things will go with this, but I know it will be fun! If any of you have any ideas or thoughts you would like to share, please let me know.

That about sums up the News for today, so until next time – Mike Taber