Wednesday, May 25, 2011

WSS cavalry- plastic

Due to the success of Wargames Factory's half price sale on WSS infantry, they have now committed to making the cavalry too. Apparently the designers are on to it next week.

Before that there was some talk of converting Warlord Games' ECW cavalry using cunning, a scalpel and spare bits from the WSS infantry.

Burleson Bill designed some WSS/LoA cavalry for the old WF crew back in the day, and he gave me some tips on conversions:

Converting Warlord ECW cav


John,
I haven't gotten very far into this process yet, just a few sample figures. However, if one is willing to do a bit of work, the Warlord figures work nicely.
The biggest challenge is that 1/2 of the Warlord box have over-the-shoulder sashes; incorrect for most WSS troops (although a few can be mixed in, especially as officers). Taking a typical box, use the 3 with back & breast and sashes for cuirassiers (carve or file the sashes off a few of them); the 3 with b&b and tassets and no sash as cuirassiers pretty much "as is" except for filing the tassets down into plain coat tails; the 3 in coat with sashes either carve the sash off and paint the coat as having a leather breast plate (Danish and some Bavarian), or paint as a plain coat and add button detail; the 3 in plain coat with sash I cut the figure off at the waist and used one of the spare torsos from WF with an appropriate head for HC or Dragoons (you can also do this with any of the figures, they match up well). You can also build up the lower legs of this last figure fairly easily with plastic putty to form "proper" boots.
Any figures used with the "lobster" helmet need to have the lower half of the center face guard removed to more accurately represent the European "spangenhelm", you can also add reinforcing "ribs" to the body of the helmet and trim the hair even with the bottom of the helmet.
For Dragoons or Caribiniers or mounted Musketeers, the spare musket from the WF set works well as is (or remove the bayonet if you depict the figure with the musket at "trail" in its sling or boot). For all others I simply cut the musket a bit shorter and painted in the detail of the front barrel band for a carbine.

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