Monthly Archives: January 2026

English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Fantasy, Historicals, Terrain, WW2 Naval

The Workbench This Weekend, 23 January 2026

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All sorts of stuff on the go recently.

The 1/1200 shore battery has had it’s pair of guns installed. They’re tiny bits of plastic broom bristle installed with superglue and very fine tweezers. Measuring the gun pits and bunkers, the whole thing is probably slightly underscale for 1/1200 (the gun pits are about 1/4″ across, they should probably be more like 1/3″ across) but it all works as an edge-of-table representation of a shore battery!

The 1/1200 shore battery in closeup, with guns in the two open gun pits.

I took advantage of a holiday sale at Pen & Sword Books and got a good solid naval camouflage library in physical form – I already owned a number of these as e-books but the real thing is nice when it’s affordable!

Three Royal Navy books, one Kreigsmarine, and one Italian book!

On the actual workbench, some of the 1/1200 3d resin printed vessels mentioned a post or two ago, and a fun pair of halfling pony cavalry from Wargames Atlantic. The chap on the left is intended for Harfoot Jousting mostly and is built straight from the WA halfling cav sprue; the trooper on the right is converted with Warlord Games 17th C pistols and such to be a halfling pistoleer medium cavalry chap.

The square vessels are Kreigsmarine Siebelfähre, seven of them with various vehicles as payload and the eighth with four 88mm as an artillery barge. In the background, a pair of sinking/exploding coastal freighters as wreck markers, and that lovely serpent hanging around…

Halfling pony cav, one lancer for Harfoot Jousting and one gunpowder fantasy conversion with Warlord horse pistols.
Siebel ferries, freighter wrecks, and a sea serpent.

Going to try to get the halflings based, cleaned up, and primed this weekend, possibly alongside some other very random fantasy figures I found while cleaning my desk up earlier this week…

Historicals, Painting, Terrain, WW2 Naval

The Workbench This Week, 7 January 2026

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A bit of 1/1200 naval action this week, as well as the usual random stuff lurking around the edges of the bench!

Aziz, Light!

Over the holidays I finally got around to something I’ve been wanting to do for several years, install more lighting over my hobby bench. I’ve got a pair of Ikea task lamps on either front corner of the bench each with a big daylight-balanced (4000K or so) bulb in them, and OK overhead lighting, but middle aged eyes need more light so I finally got around to installing a bunch of daylight LED strip lighting. Four feet of it, cut into a pair of two foot strips. Lee Valley has all the stuff to make this pretty easy, if you’re lucky enough to have an LV nearby. Ikea does too but their stuff is pricier and less flexible. The LED tape light is 120 LEDs per meter (30 per foot, nominally) so they give nice dense even task lighting.

LED tape being set up on my kitchen counter. It’s all 12V after the little transformer box in the foreground, so it’s easy and safe to work on if you have very basic electrical skills! Also, very very bright. Very. Would have made Aziz’s job so much easier…

On the Workbench

The new light strips can actually be seen reflected in the gloss varnish on the two harbour pieces below!

The workbench! Details in text, but yes, that’s a sea serpent in the centre.

On the actual workbench, two harbour pieces and a shore battery for 1/1200 boat games. With three coats of gloss varnish the harbour bits are done, and there’s just a bit of detail and cleanup to do on the shore battery.

On the right on painting sticks is a batch of 1/1200 boats a good friend 3d resin printed for me sometime last year, or possibly late 2024. There’s a pair of big Liberty ship freighters, a pair of little coastal freighters, three Tribal class Royal Navy destroyers, and a batch of eight German Siebel ferries – one gun platform version and seven with various vehicle loadouts on the decks. The two round bases are another coastal freighter that I cut in half to make a pair of wreck markers, one of which is blowing up real good as it sinks.

Yes, that is a sea serpent in the middle, a gloriously goofy sculpt from Footsore’s Harrowhyrst line sculpted by the incredibly talented Trish Carden (follow her on BSky, she’s awesome). I’m not sure it’ll ever appear in a naval game, but I might set the serpent up on the edge of the table just to worry the players…

Also some of the usual random clutter, like a base of 28mm chickens and another of ducks tucked in behind the lineup of vessels…

Historicals, Terrain, WW2 Naval

More Boating About In Mess

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Back on the WW2 fast boat thing for a start to 2026! Sometime in mid-2025 over on Bluesky I ran across Thomas Brandsetter’s early draft Torpedoes & Tides system and he was kind enough to send send us the draft rules privately. We only got one game of the system done in 2025 and didn’t really have any playtest notes to send back to Thomas, but I really like the system he’s written, a very clean adaptation of Ganesha Games’ existing Galleys & Galleons rules.

Dog boats trying to stop an E-boat sortie from Le Havre. Another playtest of what is now officially going to be a standalone Ganesha Games ruleset. This is very exciting for me, as GG is one of my favourite rules publishers. #navalwargaming

— Thomas Brandstetter (@thomasbrandstetter.bsky.social) 2025-07-24T15:38:32.661Z

All this inspired me to dust off some long-neglected things and start a couple of new ones. The last full size 1/1200 coastal module I did, back in December 2023, saw me speculating about “maybe a coastal gun battery” and it’s been back of mind ever since, so I got started on that, a simple clifftop battery somewhere along the coast of Occupied Europe inspired by some of the simpler batteries – just two open gun pits and a small cluster of supporting bunkers.

This shoreline piece isn’t designed to pair up with my existing coastline pieces, it’s a standalone corner bit. The gun pits are built up out of sheet styrene, the various bunker roofs are scrap styrene, the cliff is pink styrofoam insulation, and the whole thing is based on my usual 1mm styrene card. The two back sides of the triangular piece are about 4″ long.

Early construction. Styrofoam landform shaped with knife and sandpaper, styrene card for the emplacements.
Clifftop level view of the early construction.
Paint and more construction; the bunkers are all just tiny rectangles of styrene.
More paint and flock. Still want to do some more flock up top, guns in the two emplacements, and a bit more paint on the water.

While I was cutting styrene bases I pulled out the Brigade Models Harbour Walls I’ve had in the Pile of Opportunity since sometime in 2020 and set up a pair of simple harbour walls sticking out to sea, as seen many places along the European coasts. Absolutely nothing fancy, just 1mm styrene and the cast metal Brigade walls. Still in progress, the walls need more paint and the sea will get gloss varnish and waves. The smaller piece with the right-angle breakwater is about 6″ x 3″ and the larger multi-angle harbour is about 7″ x 4″.

Smaller harbour piece.
Larger harbour piece.

There’s also various other things going on, including a whole new batch of ships a friend 3d printed in resin for me over a year ago that I’ve finally primed, but more on those when there’s progress to show off!