A Nasty, Dirty Piece of Work

Rebasing.

A word that can bring a shudder to the spine, a cold shiver like the grim touch of Death's icy hand to any self respecting wargamer.  Surely nobody relishes the prospect of cracking models out of one surface to stick them to another, it's usually a messy business for one, time consuming, tedious and worst can result in damage bringing on the need for the second worst job; repairs.

Still after years of cursing the unrankable hordes and millions of bases involved in my Orcs and Goblins army, I've finally begun the onerous task of rebasing the little blighters for Kings of War.  The idea being to go from my old Warhammer set up of mainly singles with some double and triple bases, to blocks of ten.  All the units in KoW are multiples of ten for normal infantry so this seemed like the ideal foundation for the troops.

First for the chop would be some of my Goblins.  I began by trying to cut them free with a craft knife, but after ten minutes labour I had only freed three models from their bases, and had only narrowly missed freeing one of my digits from the bond it had long shared with my hand too.

This would not suffice.  Out with the Dremel:

A job only a single man would tackle in his kitchen...

 By comparison, the cutting disc made swift work of getting through slottabases, unibond filler and plastic cement.  But the by-product was of course a toxic spume of molten plastic, grit and plaster dust; even with two extractor fans running the room soon smelt like I'd indulged in a tire fire as a novel way of heating the apartment.

Remarkably I managed not the inadvertently chop up any goblins, and only a couple were bounced off what was left of their bases by the vibrations.  The remains (after much hoovering and cleaning up) could then be affixed to 100x40mm MDF bases, and the gaps filled with a textured finish roughly the same as the old models.

That's better

Thankfully my really old goblin spearmen and bowmen (the 4th ed. guys at the back) were just based on plain plasticard and the simple expedient of gluing these directly to the MDF and doing a little gap filling was enough the match the height of the newer models.  After a day of this grubby business I had 60 Spears and 40 bows re-based.  Whilst they'll never win any painting awards, it certainly looks acceptable to my eye, and really speeds up using the models on the table, and of course removing them too.

You do a lot of removing goblins from the table...