Star Power

Attention, Generals Grant and Sherman will be visiting Atlanta next summer. At least, 1/43rd scale versions of them will be. I worked on these two figures over the past two days. Here is a brief description of the work.

The Grant figure is a Foundry casting. They captured his face very well, along with the cigar in his hand. The pose is a bit strange as his feet splay wide apart.  I did not have the horse that came with the figure. So I scrounged around and used a 1/35th scale Cossack pony from a Dragon set. Grant's favorite horse, Cincinnati, was  big -- 17 hands tall -- and powerful, while Grant was 5'8" and slightly built. Nonetheless, the larger scale pony was a bit too big. To make the horse appear smaller I sanded the two halves by about 2mms thinning the body. I also took about 1 mm off the withers making it shorter. I added the general officer blanket to the saddle made with sheet pewter. Some two part epoxy created a saddle for the Army commander. I  added some reins using .010 by 0.030 inch styrene strip.

General Sherman started out ironically enough as the Trident Stonewall Jackson figure. He had Shermans'  6' tall, lean look. I did several modifications to the body. First I shaved off the buttons and replaced them with dots of putty in accordance with a Union general officer. I carved off Jackson's knee high boots and filed the legs to look like long trousers. I also lengthened the figure's frock coat using putty to look more like a Union officer's. I cut away the binoculars in the figure's right hand and reshaped the hand with epoxy putty. I made a new saddle and blanket using pewter and epoxy putty. I shaved off the cast on reins and added new ones with .010 by 0.030 inch styrene strip. I also used styrene strip to add shoulder bards. Finally, I swapped heads with a spare from a Trident set of Confederates. I had to reshape the hat, but the face was very close to Sherman's.

These figures will be placed on the road show, but for now I photographed them on my layout.