Pratting around with plastic pikemen - Part 1

 One of the great gifts to wargamers are the various HaT figure sets, designed with the 20mm gamer in mind. Particularly good is this one:

It essentially gives you everything you need for a Macedonian DBA army in one box, by plundering sprues from the various other boxes. As I've been working on Alexander the Brief, I've also been having a look at at my old Macedonian figures. 

One of things you get in the HaT box are a decent number of pikemen (many more than shown here). They are moulded in a variety of poses and clearly intended to form a sort of 'pike hedgehog' with various ranks of pikes at various angles. Here are some of them based up in 4 figure DBA elements.

The spears are all made out of brush bristles (as none are supplied) and they were an absolute pig to get to stick the the slippy plastic these figures were cast in. A layer of PVA, superglue, more PVA to accelerate the superglue and  another layer of floor varnish finally held these things together. 

That is all well and good, however some of the poses might look OK, but are completely impractical for both storage and for tessellating with other bases. I have a few elements of these horizontal pikes, and it was quite challenging to position the figures so the elements can butt up. They also take up and extra rank (or three) of space in the storage box and a disproportionate amount of room. 

What I SHOULD have done was take a leaf out of Graham Evans book, and just stick the pikes on at 45 degrees, never mind the location of the hands. But I did these 20 years ago, and I just made them up as the box indicated.

The other thing you don't get is enough figures in the same pose to make up elements of identical spear angles, if you use all the figures. I was determined to correct this, having got a new interest in Ancients thanks to Dominion of the Spear.

Originally this element had two figures with vertical pikes (the guys  in red) and two with angled pikes (the guys in white). By levering off the vertical spears I managed to glue them back at a reasonable angle although they are still a bit wonky. I should have taken a 'before' picture, sorry. Those aren't too bad but a lot of the original paintwork came off with the spears, all those layers of PVA and varnish. Agh!

These guys came out better, in this case the figures on the end had angled spears and the ones in the middle were horizontal. I managed to get the spears off with less damage, and reattach them with a mixture of UHU and superglue, with a final layer of PVA. They just needed a bit of touching up around the shields and hands/arms.

These guys defeated me though. The spears are resting on the figures hands and glued across their bodies, and the multiple layers of glue and varnish were really well stuck on. I might come back to these, but I think they would have to be so badly butchered they would need completely repainting. It is a shame as these are some of the nicest figures, being front rankers with beautifully detailed armour etc.

I shall think on. I've got a dim recollection I might have a spare box of pikemen in the loft, it might be easier to just paint some more and file these away out of sight.

In the end it was quite easy to re-touch the paintwork on the figures I'd managed to dismantle and reassemble, and they look fine stacked together. If you look closely you can see their hands are in the wrong place, but on the table they just sort of blend into a mass.

Good, that is a couple more usable bases of pike men anyway.