Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Creating Russell’s Battery in 20mm AZW

A friend of mine has started a 20mm Anglo Zulu war project using the great range from Newline Designs. The range is actually very good, covering most of the troop types needed for a good game. One item they don’t have though is the rocket troop made famous by the film, Zulu Dawn.
He mentioned this to me and I thought it would be a lovely surprise to make him one.
My very early thoughts were to cut a block of bolsa wood and have do, at that scale it should be fine I thought. However after a bit more thought I come to the conclusion, if you’re going to do something, do it right. So I hatched a cunning plan to actually see if I could make something that could pass as historically accurate.
I found a nice length of plastic sprue from an warlord Games orc set and that became the trough of the launcher. Rather than worry about filing a ‘v’ in it, I decided to paint it in. I figured at that scale it would look okay. It worked out better than I thought it would.
I used the artillery figures from the range as a guide to how big to make it.






The legs were created by cutting and bending paper clips. The Hales rockets were cut from a 28mm lead spear and filed to shape. Not bad I thought, a little crude but a lot better than a block of bolsa wood!

This collectors set of figures was a good help with scaling the models and also the colour of the launcher. I decided it must be artillery blue as in the Napoleonic wars, so used my handy Foundry triad paints to paint it.

 

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