Breaking The Silence

I've been a bit quiet of late, what with the holidays and the general business of life, but I haven't been totally idle with The Bureau.  So as we trickle towards the 2,500 mark I thought I'd better get back on it and bring you all up to date.

Morris progress

Well really there hasn't been any progress on the Morris Quad itself, unless you count a bit of green paint splodged on the few pieces I'd stuck together already.  I intend this to be for North Africa but I read somewhere that the interiors were often left in the bright green colour they came out of the factory with, which kinda makes sense from a time and motion point of view.

Mmmm not got very far with this.

But what I have managed to do is make progress with is the ammo trailer and 25 Pdr.

Surprisingly odd way to have the barrel made up by Airfix mould makers but it looked ok in the end, I guess.

The actual Quad kit is more fiddly than I had originally anticipated and perhaps I would have been better waiting for the Plastic Soldier Company's quick build option which I'm sure will make life far easier.

Boxing Clever

Despite a lack of progress with kit modelling I have been enjoying myself turning this

Into this (so far)

I was inspired by the work of the chaps over at Irrational Number Line Games who posted their exploits on TMP and I recognised the box as one I'd seen lying around one of the floors in the office a while back.  So after some hunting around the deserted areas (more on that later) I unearthed one and so had the basis for my own North African/NW Frontier/Afghan/Mexican adobe complex.  So whilst SWMBO is watching her soaps or drooling over Poldark I can have fun cutting and sticking on a little table in the lounge, that way I am being sociable by being in the same room (even if she does roll her eyes at what I'm doing).

I intend to do a bit of a tutorial on this build so wont ramble on too much about it here, but.......  
If anybody has a good way of coating the walls to give an adobe effect please let me know, so far I have pva with paint or tile grout and I'm really not sure about either.

Scavenging

So as I sort of alluded to above we have deserted areas in my place of work because they are shutting the site down having slowly eroded the numbers over the past few years until they could trigger an occupancy review and move us 25 miles down the M6/M61 to our Bolton office (which is actually a business park in Horwich).  So my journey to work goes from sub 20 minutes (normally 17 or 18) to north of 45 minutes depending on the great British motorway system.  From office views of playing fields, the grounds of a stately home, a few houses, a golf course and then fields

to offices, dual carriageways and a football ground with the retail park just beyond 

What a stunning view!

Home of Horwich Trotters FC

From lunchtime walks with views like this:

Lunchtime walking route

Kite surfers on the Ribble Estuary

To walking round one of those cloned retail parks which could mean I could be anywhere in the country and wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Cloned retail park

Anyhoo our top dudes and dudesses, in their infinite widsom, thought this would be a spiffing adventure and we'd all love it.  The upshot is that our office block is now about 1/3 empty with piles of old files and other stuff, there is even an area of stationery that we can help ourselves to and permission to 're-purpose' furniture.  So amongst the various files and folders, pens and staplers I've liberated I have also been collecting some little bits and bobs to build some more adobe buildings from.  Will be keeping my eyes open for more stuff as it empties more, especially as we're going to be one of the last teams out.

I've also got my eye on some cabinets to sort my garage storage out, along with providing me with some gaming/modelling storage.  The kids loved their 'new' top notch office chairs as well.

And finally, a new little friend for the Bureau from my holidays, all the way from Athens.

Twit to woo

Birthday Bits

Well another year older and closer to death (as somebody once sang), but a few goodies for the painting bureau received as part of the birthday package (even if I did have to write them down for the boss, and even buy the kits for my boys to give me). 



Birthday goodies

So we have a couple of Airfix 25pdr and Quad kits for my North Africa ambitions.  Which, with hindsight (such a wonderful thing), I might have been better going for the Italeri kit having now read some of the write ups and made a start on these kits.
Along with the kits there is a set of 3 UniPin pens 0.1mm fine line pens (red, blue and black) and a W&N Series 7 Miniature size 000.

In Other News

The Dak is slowly but surely coming on with the huge filling job completed and sanded off.  I know that when the undercoat is applied there will be areas which look a little rough, but this is going to be a wargaming piece primarily and not a exact miniature presentation fit to grace the pages of a magazine so I'm not going to go back and refill all the little bits and bobs, then sand again and prime again.  Life really is too short.  If it's good from a couple of feet then that'll do.  Now to mask it all up ready for a spray.

All sanded down and the engraving redone, hopefully it wont look to bad once sprayed up.

No progress getting the Tomahawk or Spit on the field at the moment, I need to get to a descent hobby/model shop to get some spray mattcoat which will hopefully take the sheen of them both.  For now they gather dust.

At least the gathering dust gives a matt finish

I've already made a start on the first of the Morris Quad tractors and it seems a far more tricky kit than I was perhaps expecting, mainly due to the actual body of the thing coming in several spate pieces which need some fairly precise gluing.

I think that's the easy bit done!!!