Casting The Cavalry.

And some mounted officers, of course.

The Standard Bearers are usually some of the hardest figures to cast from the PA moulds, so I regard myself well ahead of the game if I can get more than 40% of them through my QA rules in a single casting session.

The other issue with all the mounted figures is that with some it's often hard to keep the two halves of the larger moulds totally aligned, and so it's not uncommon for a small ridge around the odd figure, which I can usually live with. It's often quicker to file it away than try for a better casting. If it's really bad, then it'll go back in the pot.

These are from the PA moulds, with casting plugs clipped off, but not yet cleaned up. Again, they retain the classic Holger Ericsson look.





Here, the officer pointing with sword (below) ended back in the scrap pile. One doesn't have to look too hard to see the prominent ridges, especially on the arm and sword. The front legs of the horse were very bad too. At first glance I thought it would be OK, but as I was setting it up for shots, I eventually decided it was outside of my QA rules.




With the Standard Bearer I usually have to let a little flash creep in (loose clamps) in order to get the whole thing filled. It also has a strong tendency for the mould halves to slide during clamping, and the failure rate for this mould is very high, often reaching 70% on a bad day.

Iconic Holger Ericsson Poses.

Although I do have a couple of other poses for Foot and Grenadiers, these two types will make up around 90% of the Infantry.



These castings are not yet cleaned up, but one can get a good idea of the sparsity of detail on them...

40mm Home Cast Fictional Lace Wars

I've toyed with the idea of abandoning this time-consuming project and selling these moulds off a few times now, but finally made the decision to carry on. The argument winner here was that not long ago, I managed to find two great moulds; the Marching Foot Shouldered Arms, and the Marching Grenadier Shouldered Arms.

These are two iconical Holger Ericsson poses, made famous in their 30mm Spencer Smith manifestations in both Brig. Young's Charge and Charles Grant's The War Game.

I also dug up some old style HE Cavalry Command moulds; the Trumpeter and Standard Bearer, as well as a generic Mounted Officer Pointing with Sword.



Thus armed with my new enthusiasm, I went on a casting spree and knocked out most of this little lot in a couple of days last month. It's still a very cheap project. I have around a hundred weight of white metal, which was boosted by our gardener finding around 20 lbs of roofing lead in one of our flower beds out front.



The figures at the front are the Marching Foot, Shouldered Arms. I've not cast any of the Marching Grenadiers as yet, but don't anticipate any problems, as the mould is unused.

I had originally settled on units of 20 (including Drummer, Standard Bearer and NCO), plus the Colonel. However, those small battalions seem to lack presence on the tabletiop, even for 40mm figures. So now I've settled on units of 24, including Standard Bearer, Drummer and NCO, and a Colonel, 25 in total.

I've decided on squadron sizes of 16, including all command, for the Cavalry. That's really a compromise as they are large figures and take up a lot of room on the table. Artillery will be a gun and six figures per battery.