Last of the Hussite Warwagons Done

Project Lead Mountain Keeps Giving Up Gifts

As part of a Hussite junk purchase off EBay I ended up with a badly assembled Essex Warwagon without crew or horses. I took it apart and assembled it properly and raided the spares box for some crew and motive power. The Horses were also Essex and the three crew a mix of Essex and Minifigs. I finally finished it yesterday so its now ready to offer for sale. Painted generically so it will do for Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Hussites and Germans.

I also had a bag of 16 Museum Miniatures MD04 Genoese Crossbowmen with Pavise to complete. They are nice castings and easy to paint up well. They only time sink is decorating the shields with various Italian City States colours. I may sell these as well but I have a suitable space in my storage box for them so there's no rush at present. Sold at the club today!

Hussite Infantry - Part 3

Note Strictly Hussite Infantry - Warwagons

As part of my ongoing scan of EBay a while back I spotted a lot consisting of four Falcon Figures Hussite Warwagons. Falcon Figures are virtually unobtainable in the UK after the range was sold to an American many years ago and their reputation for supplying orders is to put it politely "very poor" so I took a punt on them and got them for what I considered a bargain price. The warwagons came in two codes, ELM21 Warwagon with 4 Oxen & 4 crew and ELM 23 Warwagon with four Oxen & 4 crew, light artillery. ELM21 actually has 5 crew not 4.

Given the age of the castings I was very surprised how nice they were. The design is a bit suspect because the side door could not be opened as the wheels would be in the way. Also the oxen were 20mm tall so more akin to Auroch than any sort of normal oxen for this era, [More of this later].

I decided that given the poor scale of the oxen I would replace them with 15mm Irregular limber teams from my spares box. Other than that the castings were cleaned up, assembled and painted right out of the bags. They are mounted on magnetised plastic sheeting, covered with Vallejo Earth Brown paste edged with Raw Umber paint, finished off with some gravel, grass tufts and flowers from Micks Bits.

I have another 4 Irregular and 1 Essex warwagon still to complete and in theory if I am not too choosy I could field all 22 warwagons as per the Hussite list. It's not an army I have any desire to collect and as soon as the last five warwagons are completed I shall have to decide what if any I intend to keep because I need some to use with my Lithuanian army. Though I can use my Hungarian or Polish warwagons at a push. I also have the four generic Hungarian warwagons that I blogged about in this post that are spare. https://drewjarman.blogspot.com/2018/09/when-ebay-strikes-hide-your-credit-card.html

Falcon Figures ELM23

Falcon Figures ELM21

The giant Falcon Oxen

Placed in front of an Irregular Warwagon

In front of the Falcon Warwagon with the Irregular limber team

Early and Later Polish - Part 5

Feudal & Medieval Polish - Part 5

QR Miniatures PA1 & PA2 Early Polish CinC element

Peter Kershaw let me know about QR Miniatures from Poland a little while back and I have already blogged some of their castings. Since I decided I am building both the Early and Later Polish armies I needed to ensure I had sufficient correct looking figures to form the core of the army. I sent off an order to QR on 2nd April 2017 and within a short while I got my order back. I already have lots of suitable castings to paint up for the Early Polish mounted arm so I decided that part of the order would only have a few castings for the Early Polish army to create the command elements. The figures are very crisp and required very little cleaning up. They come as single piece castings and have separate spears which means you will have to drill out their hands. I discarded the spears because I wanted to have longer spears to act as standard bearers and they were a bit flimsy for my linking. Each command element is colour coded because they are Irregular generals and this is necessary to ensure the correct dice is used when rolling. Here are the four completed generals elements.

  

Much to my surprise the ongoing task that is Project Lead Mountain keeps giving up more options to create other armies. I still have lots of Medieval knight castings to paint so a quick root through the box produced 15 Essex horses and 14 riders. I wanted a distinctive 15th rider to become a general and I had a rather fearsome looking Minifigs knights with crested helm and axe in the spares. The Later Polish army has the option to take a 4th Regular Knight General commanding Bohemian regular Mercenary Knights. Its only a small command and both the general and the knights are optional but if taken the general can only command the Bohemian knights and no one else. If he isn't taken the knights can be commanded by any other Polish general. The figure codes are lost in the mists of time but do paint up very well and I dont mind mixing Minifigs and Essex riders is they are all on Essex horses. I didn't like the Essex mounted standard bearer as originally cast so I cut off the standard and replaced it with a metal spear.

Mixed Essex & Minifigs Medieval Bohemian Mercenary Knights 

Both the Early and Later Polish armies can use Lithuanian cavalry Light Horse and the Later Polish list gets the option of taking a Lithuanian general to command this contingent. I already had two odd Lithuanian light horse elements which I had picked up off EBay for next to nothing late last year as part of a job lot left over from someones Teutonic army sale. They were Essex castings and I ordered some more EMED22 castings to match these and since I wanted a LH general I ordered a pack of XMED13 and XMED14 for him. It means I still have some left over castings but as the old saying goes you never know when these will come in useful. Potentially you can take 21 Lithuanian LH including their general and also take 2 Tartar LH S if you want. I know that I shall probably never need that many LH elements for the Polish army so decided to only complete 9 elements including the general. If I need any more I can also use some of my Hungarian castings to bulk them out and the Hungarians already have a few Tartar LH elements so I didnt need to paint any of those. I decided it was easier to match paint the additional castings to the original four castings as I liked their finished effect.

Essex EMED22, XMED13 & XMED14 Lithuanian Light Horse