Comstars Historical Wargames : Assembled my first Bolt Action infantry, and undercoated

Sunday, 19 January 2025

Assembled my first Bolt Action infantry, and undercoated

I got most of these infantry years ago but Bolt Action V3 has got me to put them together.

Most of the infantry is all from https://www.slave2gaming.com/ from their 28mm Australians at Bardia range. I seem to be missing one of the squad commanders with SMG but that's OK. I should buy 2 more Vickers MMG's and 2 Stokes mortars.

After playing around with my list for the 99th time I have all the infantry figures I need, and some left over. I still need to put together 2 Warlord Games resin Australia Matilda II's. The actual battle had English ones but close enough.

The infantry and my soon to somewhat replaced paints

This is all because I had a great half uncle who was in the Australian 6th Division 2/2 Field Park company - the combat engineers. This is a...play to win list, so does not follow correct historical order of battle. But it does match the theme. I think in real life the engineers wouldn't have been in the Universal carriers of the Divisional cavalry but it's close enough for my fluff, or moved past the initial barbed wire, anti tank ditch and minefields. I'll need to read the company's battle history I downloaded from the AWM eventually to see what they actually did.

There's also some Warlord Games Snipers, Australian Radio/spotter crew, some objective carts, British officers, a wounded carrier (come to think of it, that would make a good medic!), and a pinup called Jesse from a Kickstarter.

I found they only had mold lines on the bases that took some filing off. Unfortunately nearly all of them have bayonets ready, and they BEND ALL THE TIME. I expect they'll snap off before their first battle and look bad doing it with just the bayonet lug left. I don't know how to fix that :( The paint on the undercoat's coming off of them already.

I should have put some sappers equipment on some of them, but I have JUST enough to work as my rifles AND my engineers. I think I will get some more advancing infantry later and make them the more obvious engineers, 1 squad of whom will have satchel chargers (aka anti-tank grenades).

Pictures below the line:

Undercoated with Vellejo English Uniform

I had so many problems learning how to use a spray can again. I tried the old method of just spraying 10 at a time on cardboard, but THIS DOES NOT WORK. It took 8 attempts to get all the undersides.

I admitted defeat and put 5 at a time on a piece of broken chair I have and that worked fine.

The paint is a bit dark for the uniform I think, but close enough. It probably would work better painted over a light color, but I intend to do some Zenithal Priming with a pale sand colour for the helmet and top side of the figure. This I CAN do it on a flat piece of cardboard at 45 degrees for the sun to be behind them as they advance (err the wrong direct for Bardia, but correct for Tobruk). I'd prefer the light being behind them, so they look better to me than my opponent will care.

Otherwise the paint seems perfectly fine as an undercoat, and as none of the Army Painter cans have the right colour I think, worked better than using them. I've used up nearly the entire can doing this lot, though as listed above, the first 10 got way to many re-coats.