That Sinking Feeling When That EBay Bargain Turns Up!
"Caveat Emptor"
When you spot that good deal on EBay and think that its only going to need a little tidying up to make them look OK on the table top.
The listing was totally honest and the pictures clear so I cannot claim I was misled in the slightest. They were well packed and arrived intact. Being second hand and fairly old I expected some damage and to my surprise only found two figures were broken, missing their weapons. I easily repaired these in 15 minutes so no harm there. I thought I could freshen up the bases but it turned out they were a mix of materials which had warped over time and were covered in old railway style flocking. So I ended up having to remove all 100 peasants from their 20 bases. The wagons were a different problem, they were fine out of the box except for the fact they were on very odd sized bases meaning that they were useless in their current form. So off with their bases for them too.
Here are the pictures taken from the EBay listing to give you an idea what I bought. For some players I am sure they would have been happy to use them as is and perhaps I was being too fussy.
So the refurbishing began in earnest, first up are the wagons. I must admit I had always intended to refresh the wagons and resell them on to offset some of my initial outlay. There were four wagons of an unknown make. One of the wagens is fully laden and too long to fit on a standard 40mm x 40mm baggage base so it ended up as a double sized baggage element. It OK on its new base, much to my surprise.
Each of the three smaller wagons were a perfect fit on a standard 40mm x 40mm baggage base and again the end result looks OK.
All of the wagons are now listed on EBay.
The 100 mixed peasants were a different problem. There were a few mixed makes in the lot and I knew that I had to be careful how I rebased them to make sure they didn't look odd. First thing I noticed was that I had nine shieldless javelinmen. I realised that these would be perfect to create three more Irr Ax X to go into my Welsh Army, so RESULT no harm done there and an easy win.
 |
| Three Welsh Irr Ax X elements |
Having culled nine castings from the original batch I knew I was now short of some figures to make up twenty Horde elements. I had four spare leftover painted peasants from when I had reused them to make up some Auxilia for use in my Catalan Company army. In the end I managed to create sixteen Irr Hd O elements using a total of 80+9 castings out of the 104 I eventually had available. This means I had 15 leftover castings which have gone into the spares draw along with some other peasant castings. Whilst I was rebasing the castings a mate from the club casually mentioned that he needed four elements of Irr Hd O for his Feudal English army, this was after I had part based all the figures. He normally bases his own figures so they all match and I was lucky enough to have been able to sell him these elements part based. I made four batches, each of four elements to ensure each batch had a decent figure mix.
Here are some pictures of each batch which will probably all end up back on EBay to enable me to recoup some of what I spent on buying them in the first place. Hopefully I might even make a profit?
 |
| Four x Irr Hd O elements [Batch 1] |
 | |
|
 | |
|
 | |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment