Limber Labour of Love

The first of Rob's magnificent Guard Artillery gun teams is ready at last. It all took a bit longer than I expected, but they were very complex to paint and assemble and it took me a while to figure it all out.

The figures are:

Hinton Hunt:

FN 188 French Horse Artillery Of the Guard Artillery Drivers Corps driver x2

H 3: French (nearside) Gun Horse x 2

H4: French (offside) Gun Horse x 2

Der Kriegspielers Napoleoniques:

French Limber from the # 32: French 6" Howitzer, limber and four-horse team set.

Warrior:

FA1: French 8lb Field Gun

Getting everything to fit together  required quite a bit of planning. The DK limber came complete with swingletrees, but to attach these to the horses I first had to cut them off the limber and then wrap lengths of fuse wire around them. The fuse wires were then soldered to the horses to create the traces. The trick here was then to attach a short nib of solder on the rear of each swingletree, and then paint each horse assembly while leaving these nibs unpainted.

The limber also needed a bit of cutting back and rearranging so that everything would fit back together again neatly. Again, I attached small nibs of solder on to the points on the limber where the swingletrees would reattach. These nibs were also left unpainted.

The final stage was then to glue everything in place on the base with the nibs on the swingletrees and limber just touching. My hope was it would take just a quick application of heat with the soldering iron for them to melt together and form a single string, and much to my relief this is exactly what happened. It was then just a quick dab of black paint and varnish and the job was done.

The Warrior guns have also been given a repaint, although its hard to tell the difference. The only real change here was to add some bent steel pins to create the tool brackets on either side of the trails.

And that, I'm very pleased to say, is the end of Phase One.

WM