From KerryT - The cause of much swearing - a maritime entry (40 points)

Morning, afternoon and evening all

One good thing about the AHPC is that it compels you to complete some long unfinished figures. In my case, the figure in question is a 1/1200 Napoleonic ship from Langton Miniatures

This is a British frigate and probably was one of the oldest unpainted figures in my collection. I moved to NZ in 1999 and brought it with me, probably having bought it in the early 90s. I painted up and rigged about a dozen British and French ships of the line at the time and added a frigate but never put it together. I was daft enough or bold enough, depending on your perspective to get a frigate in full sail

I managed to find an old article in Miniature Wargames issue 80 called "splicing the main brace". This was the original guide for painting and modelling

Just checked, it was published in January 1990

Painting was easy enough but my eyes are not what they were and I don't recall having so much difficulty when completing the original models and this is when the swearing started. There was a lot of it, particularly when the sail came away from the foremast mid way through!

Here it is next to to an older model

My limited suturing skills came in handy here

The round painting base added to the problem as it kept rolling

After at least 4 hours of sweat, tears and toil and some old fashioned Anglo-Saxon phrases, it eventually came together. I confess I nearly gave up after completing the standard rigging (black thread) but persisted in the end and completed the running rigging (light thread)

See the gap between the topgallant and the foremast!

Not sure I'll ever buy more of these after that ordeal!

Thus in summary

Maritime bonus  20 points

1 x 1/1200 ship - no idea points wise but Millsy the riggin took friggin ages!

From Millsy: I laughed immediately I saw the title of this post Kerry following our chat earlier in the week. As I said at the time I outsourced all my rigging work and I think you can appreciate why! Frustrations aside you've done a lovely job on every aspect of the model and the effort invested in the rigging certainly paid off in the overall result. Given the rigging let's score this as a 28mm vehicle at 20 points, bringing the total for the sub to 40 points. Nice work mate and I hope the PTSD isn't too bad!