Project Lead Mountain - Interregnum

PLM - An Update

Well the best laid plans came to a crashing halt. Halfway through my next Swiss Cantonal Contingent and after deciding that my next army project would be the Delhi Sultanate from the Later Muslim Indian army list guess what happened. I saw a listing on EBay for a painted Cilician Armenian army. It had a starting price of £130 with the Submit an Offer option. I thought I would be really cheeky as the army contained 248 infantry and 63 mounted castings, all painted but the pictures were not that clear. I offered £100 and to my surprise it was accepted which worried me a bit. Three days later on the 4th August 2016 a big parcel arrived containing the army. The infantry were painted and based to a reasonable standard but to be brutally honest the mounted were mostly total rubbish. After sorting through the mounted castings I took the 12 horse archers, affixed magnetic basing underneath and immediately put them into my Early Armenian/Parthian army box as they were totally unsuitable to use as Bedouin as was claimed. Of the rest three castings were damaged beyond repair so the horses are now in my spare mounts pile. Of the rest 21 were so badly painted they were put in a pot of paint stripper for 24 hours. I then cleaned them off with an old toothbruch and sorted them into suitable groups to go into my Delhi Sultanate army project. The remaining were a mix of very old Essex and Minifigs and too old to be stripped without destroying them. After removing the remaining castings from their bases 18 of the 33 mounted had broken lances so I carefully drilled out their hands and replaced them with new steel lances. I then re-sorted them into like batches ready for some serious refurbishment work. It was at this time I decided that the best solution would be to design some suitable shield transfers for them so off to the WWW I went in search of suitable historic patterns for Cilician Armenian shields and flags. Three hours later and after a few test prints I emerged with three sheets of A4 black waterslide transfers in varying diameters. Once the army is finished I will be putting these on EBay so they wont go to waste. 

The infantry was a mix of basing styles and some of them were not based up correctly for the rules I use so I decided to rebase all the archers. It was then that I realised that I was going to be short of sufficient castings to make up enough of each type that I wanted and I dont really like having to match paint other peoples work. Some of the archers are based up as Ps and were of a make I could not identify but are well enough painted that they will go back on EBay with no trouble later in the year.  A quick look at the other castings made me realise they were all Essex figures so I sorted out which infantry codes they were and submitted another order to Essex for the missing archers and some more Armenian cavalry and some more spearmen. This means that my total spend has not climbed to £150. This is still below the cost I would have paid for the bare metal and I still have 21 mounted castings left over that are now in PLM. Once the army is finally completed I will do a proper blog entry showing the final results.