On Yer Bike!

At certain points in its history, the Herefordshire Regiment has had a cyclist section, so I thought it’d be fun to do a unit for my VBCW version, so I ordered the Home Guard cyclist pack from Wargames Foundry and, to add some variation, some British Tommies on cycles from Warlord Games.

Sadly, ‘fun’ soon turned into ‘frustrating’…

For a start, the Warlord minis proved to be an absolute bugger to put together for a cack-handed modeller like me and by the time I had finished the bikes were somewhat twisted and bent. Secondly they were disappointingly smaller than the Foundry ones (which went together like a charm, although I still managed to bend some of them).

I persevered, adding more variation with a headswap and swapping one rifle for a BAR, but  you know the feeling when a project goes awry and you lose all enthusiasm for it? That was me…

I half painted one of them to test the effectiveness of Coat d’Arms Super Shader as a replacement for Army Painter Quickshade, which I was getting fed up with (I loved the results, but not the brush cleaning with white spirits, the resultant smell and the eventual solidification of said brush). I was not happy with the result.

And so they languished in my tool/painting/bits box, undercoated but unloved while I cracked on with vehicles, hill fighters, scarecrows and the like. Eventually however, with my unpainted lead pile starting to mount up, I forced myself to finish them off (this time using Vallejo Umber shade, which I am happier with despite the lack of varnish protection the other two products give) – and here they are, wobbling precariously into battle on wonky requisitioned bicycles of various sizes!