HELMET Soldiers

Hello Sensation Seekers and welcome to what is becoming a very infrequent HELMET Soldiers Blog.

A few bits of news before talking about the photos. We attended the London Show in March and The Plastic Warrior show in Richmond a couple of week back in May. We had reasonable days at each event although a lot of people in the trade are talking about falling sales and we are noticing a drop in orders recently, due no doubt to the financial situation world wide. Please keep buying from the trade, for some people such as our friend Steve Weston, here in the UK, it is their only income source, and livelihoods depend on steady income streams, HELMET wouldn't say no to a few more orders either!

Right behind our stand at Richmond was a table manned by the legendary Ron Barzo, what a good mannered and polite gentleman he is, I was able to show him some conversations based on his products and HELMET spare parts, fortunately he was OK about some of his chaps coming under the influence of my sharp knife, I guess that's partly what this madness of our hobby is all about.

So to the pics:

First up are a quartet of the recently released Black Cat Russians, great stuff and what a helpful man, the owner of Black Cat, Harold Scott is, hopefully he will add the officers, drummers etc that he already produces in metal.

Next are three Prussians from resin moulds made by yours truly and a Wurtenburg infantryman made from our spare parts as an experiment. I'm going to attempt a Bavarian using the same approach. Basically it's one of our British infantry bodies and arms with a Russian dragoon head with the crest removed and a pipecleaner added, French musket and pack, again from resin, and a smart paint job - something a bit different I think.

The next three photos are back to the War of 1812, I thought it might be interesting to show a few figures after conversion but before painting, so here are three Americans. The first is a Marine of the period, again an experiment to see if things "work". It's one of our torsos arms and equipment with a stovepipe shako head on Timpo Prussian legs. You can clearly see the greenstuff additions to the shako and the shoulder belt plate. I'm fairly satisfied so will now make a few more, not too many but their uniform is neat and we have a couple of Playmobil ships that need crewing. The line infantry are done in a similar manner but have different shakos with greenstuff additions and knapsacks with HELMET canteen and haversack parts added. The middle figure is a CTS Mexican and the one on the right is from the same army, but made by BMC. His left arm is strangely thin so I have built up the limb with successive layers of paint left over in my mixing tray whilst completing the previous batch of models, you can also see this on the bayonets and some of the belts - well it works for me!

Lastly some Brits in stovepipes again. I want to have about 50 of these eventually, but progress is slow. I've played about with positions to add some variety, and the corporal loading with his ramrod has big bushy sideburns added from the ubiquitous greenstuff, see the final picture for a close up. There are nearly 30 different colours on these which goes some way to explaining the time it takes to complete, but hopefully the effort is worthwhile?

That's all for now, as usual comments and feedback are welcome.

Take care and keep the faith.

Cheers

Eric www.helmetsoldiers.co.uk