A small Zulu Wars project...

Contents of ZWB 09: Bombardier, infantry "hired help", rocket trough and 3 9pdr Hale's rockets.

I haven't got any painting done at all this month as I have been away in the Gulf and Washington. Any spare time I have had has been taken up with Guy's D-Day project. This weekend I am transferring all my files from my old 80GB computuer to my shiny new 750GB computer. Hopefully all those long waits whilst things process will be a thing of the past as they jolly well should be for £1,000 without a monitor!

However, I am keen to get started again, especially with Salute coming up, and I just took delivery of some more of Empress Miniatures lovely new Zulu War British. I bought the new officers set which includes two figures in patrol jackets (hooray!), the infantry firing with fixed bayonets and the rocket set. I have decided to make the rocket set my next project as it has only two figures in it!

The first stage was to attach the rear legs to the rocket trough. Sounds simple but what a nightmare! I used superglue and just couldn't get the thing to stick. After 10 attempts I gave up and decided on an alternative approack of sticking the legs to the base first. It kept falling over so I sellotaped a match to the the base so I could lean it on it at the right angle while the glue set. There is just too little surface contact to make this easy I suppose. Anyway, this worked and then I could glue the trough on top and let gravity keep it in place.

The trough (the technical designation was "Machine Rocket, War) set up.

In the picture on the Empress site they have the rear legs at 90 degrees to the ground and the trough is, as a result, horizontal. They also seem to have cut off the bent end of the leg which also stops it pointing upwards. As you can see from the diagram below the curved end to the leg was part of the design.

Machine Rocket,War: note angle of the rear legs

In reality the rear legs were at an angle to the trough. Changes in elevation were made by shifting the upright (on the right in the picture above) along the arm at the bottom, but of course it doesn't move on the model. This isn't a problem as the maximum elevation of the trough was only 15%; we're not talking a howitzer-type trajectory here!

Here is the team ready for action. Some people like to make little diorama type bases with figures like this. I don't! For some reason I have always wanted my soldiers to be individually based. No element basing for me! This is why I will never play Field of Glory, DB whatever or anything else that involves "stands". Warhammer and The Sword of the Flame are much more my style!

More about the Hale rocket in the next post.