So I was away for the extended weekend. Away from my paints and brushes and other necessary equipment. This could spell doom for my production output. Fortunately, I was prepared for this eventuality. I packed a box full of fresh figures and parts, together with clippers, hobby knifew and a couple of files.

As I may have mentioned before, cleaning figures is the part I least like about this hobby. However, it is something that doesn't require a whole lot of tools and can be done almost anywhere as long as you can get some decent light. And light is something we have no shortage of in summertime Finland.

So I spent three days sitting by the lake cleaning figures. I started with the remaining hopper bugs because I want to finish all the little guys before moving onto the big stuff. Incidentally it took me two hours to clean the parts for six hoppers -- not including assembly, not even including clipping the parts off the sprue. That's twenty minutes per figure! The only good thing about the hoppers is that they are reasonably large so the parts are not too fiddly.

Some inspiration landed nearby while I was doing them. Now I'll just have to figure how to transfer that pattern to the hopper wings.

Next up were my remaining orc archers. I need these for the July resolutions, so they got priority. These were pretty simple to clean but still took maybe five minutes per figures, the mold line being pretty prominent and needing to be removed all around the figure. Twenty orcs later I was up for the next challenge...

...Which came in the form of an African dictator and his cronies. I recently got these figures from The Assault Group for our next Force On Force campaign. The game is starting in September, so I really can't forget about these guys. As usual for TAG, the castings were very clean and really fast and easy to clean. 29 more or less ragtag warriors later they were done too.

On to the next thing then. I was out of hard priority stuff and I needed to make a decision... so, daleks, more hoplites or... yes, I picked up my remaining Portuguese. I thought I had 36 of them, but in the end it turned out they were still the old style 8-figure packs so I actually had 48 troopers.

They are a bit old and the molds are starting to show it, making them a bit more difficult to clean than the Africans. Then again, they were all in identical poses, so after a couple it became a pretty mechanical excercise.

In the end that was 6 bugs, 20 orcs, 29 Africans and 48 Portuguese... a total of 103 figures cleaned! I don't think I'll need to scrape any figures in July unless I want to.

P.S. The Portuguese are in a firing pose, but I find the poses a bit weird. The figure is resting the stock against its bicep, not shoulder and the eyeline is maybe four scale inches above the sight line. Now, I know in Napoleon's time many armies considered target practice to be waste of good powder and maybe the figure is just preparing to shoot and just isn't really aiming yet... but the stock position is just a recipe for a giant bruise.

This is especially weird considering the figures were sculpted by the Perry twins. Many figure sculptors lack first hand experience with weapons and either copy poses from artwork or just sculpt whatever looks cool with little regard for realism, but the Perrys are active re-enactors. Michael lost his arm in an accident with a real muzzle loading cannon. One would think they'd know how one fires a flintlock musket...

I must admit I know next to nothing about Napoleonic musket drills. Maybe they just were idiots more interested in producing loud noise than actually hitting anything? Leave a comment below if you know more.

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