As the title suggests, its been a busy couple of weeks for projects, sufficiently so that i haven't had time to actually post any of them. But rest assured, things are being made/finished... kind of, well at least they're progressing a bit anyway.
Posts coming later this week and next of the now 99% complete bar lighting and a heavy modification to the TV unit. Plus a new shoe rack, which is less interesting, but helpful!
Finished substantial amounts of painting too of the Imperial Guard. Probably post some pictures of those soon too now i've done some converting as well.
*Maybe* (read, i really hope) there'll be some tech projects soon, once i've done more building.
Wednesday 30 January 2013
Monday 14 January 2013
The Pasta Win/Fail
This is actually a post from the middle of last year, but i've only just got round to putting the picture in the words. Enjoy:
A while ago we made some meat balls to go with some pasta. But that didn't really work as there wasn't enough pasta for two. Fail, my bad.
As a happy accident there were some spare finger rolls and as a result, two impromptu meatball marinaras. Win! Having never had one before (yes i know, shush) i was pleased, mostly by how much less messy it was than I expected. I reckon one from Subway would probably go everywhere when its drowned in sauce however.
Needless to say, this will be happening again.
I'll probably end up posting more of these which have been languishing in the draft section, for no better reason than to do something. there are quite a few quick food related posts to do when I have a spare minute.
A while ago we made some meat balls to go with some pasta. But that didn't really work as there wasn't enough pasta for two. Fail, my bad.
As a happy accident there were some spare finger rolls and as a result, two impromptu meatball marinaras. Win! Having never had one before (yes i know, shush) i was pleased, mostly by how much less messy it was than I expected. I reckon one from Subway would probably go everywhere when its drowned in sauce however.
I'll probably end up posting more of these which have been languishing in the draft section, for no better reason than to do something. there are quite a few quick food related posts to do when I have a spare minute.
Friday 11 January 2013
More bright ideas in the kitchen
Follwing on from my bar lighting tonight i fitted the second set of LED rope light to the kitchen. To illustrate the problem, here the before:
Its not actually *quite* that bad to the human eye, but its pretty bad, you can see the shadow I cast over the counter in the corner, and the corner isn't actually the worst part, it was just the tidiest. So that's no flash, onto the work surface from my view point.
The lights are attached to the underside with self adhesive "no damage" (allegedly) pads and hooks and zip ties in a nice pattern.
Impressive;y if it'd been a foot longer it would have gone around and wound about too much, and a foot shorter would have been too short to complete a full circuit around the cabinets front and rear edges. Good work really.
This is same corner with the lights in place:
Massive difference, £13 well spent if you ask me.
Its not actually *quite* that bad to the human eye, but its pretty bad, you can see the shadow I cast over the counter in the corner, and the corner isn't actually the worst part, it was just the tidiest. So that's no flash, onto the work surface from my view point.
The lights are attached to the underside with self adhesive "no damage" (allegedly) pads and hooks and zip ties in a nice pattern.
Impressive;y if it'd been a foot longer it would have gone around and wound about too much, and a foot shorter would have been too short to complete a full circuit around the cabinets front and rear edges. Good work really.
This is same corner with the lights in place:
Massive difference, £13 well spent if you ask me.
Thursday 10 January 2013
Illuminating ideas at the bar.
For a while now i've had a bar in the corner of my living-room, and its awesome! except for one problem. When you stand at the bar, you're directly between the light in the center of the room, and the drinks, so you cant really see anything while pouring.
So here's the bar:
Its still not 100% finished, but i've been waiting for a solution to the light problem to do it. Or to move house.
The other problem is the amount of different drinks needed for a really good variety of interesting drinks. Bases and juice only go so far, which is why this happened of many years of collecting:
I've been looking at getting some strips of paper back LEDs you tear to a length, and then wire them all up, but today in Costco, we found some rope light. 18 feet to be precise for the princely sum of £13. And even better you can daisy chain them together 'safely' (so the box says) to make a single 300 foot string.
Sadly i have no need nor space nor money for 300 feet o fit, so one strip for here and another for the kitchen has to suffice.
As a temporary fix until i can get some better stick on fixings and to make sure I hadn't wasted my money I've used some twist ties and ingenuity to fix it in place.
Happily, it looks pretty good, once it gets a front fascia to hide the rope from view from the rest of the room, i recon it'll look even better.
Next on the list is mounting the other set in the kitchen under the cupboard so I can see the worktop. Whoever designed the lighting in this house must really hate tall people. In the kitchen its right in the middle, so as soon as you're stood in front of any work surface or cupboard, you're blocking all direct light to anything. Even short people block the counter tops from light, its rubbish. But not for long...
Monday 7 January 2013
New Year, New posts.
Whats this? A new post, blimey! Third times the charm. Maybe this year i'll update this more frequently, (yeah, right) and perhaps I'll finish the draft posts form last year!
Well its a nice idea anyway. On with the new stuff.
If you dont care for Warhammer, then you might as well skip this, as its pretty much all about that for this post. You have been warned. I assure you, there will be some variation coming shortly. Skip to the end and see what else i'm going to maybe forget to post about thats happened since I last did anything here.
For the couple of years or so i've been making an Imperial Guard army, i say making, i've been rebuilding one I had some time ago and adding to it for the new rules. Surprisingly ignoring a game for a decade results in the rules changing dramatically.
After much pondering and delay in actually doing anything at all to make them line up in a coherent fashion i've decided on my company colours and markings. Which is a fairly big step in actually finishing models. For sometime i've had Red and Blue pegged as the first Platoon colours, but other than that, I've been indecisive. Blue is the overall company colour, and Red the platoon colour. In addition, this will be the Cadian 83rd Mobile Infantry. With that, every squad that can be, will have a dedicated transport available to them to use. That means a chimera for every command squad and regular troop squad in the company.
With the potential for 6 platoons, one command squad and 5 infantry squads in each one, that makes for 36 Chimeras. Sigh. This would be awesome, had i not made a fatal mistake when painting some of my tanks to paint each of the rivets in the hull silver. 724 rivets PER Chimera. So far, I have 4.
Granted i've actually got a couple more that either need building or painting, but this is at least the ones i've finished. Still, this amounts to roughly 2900 rivets. Fortunately, i've also finished the troops to go with these, but i'll post them another time.
I also dont actually need 36 of these, as due to various other choices i have for the army, i will (for now at least) be limiting it, if i can call it that, to 4 platoons, which is a mere 24, not including a couple other ones for company command squads and commissars.
The company command one wont be standard however, and i'm trying to collect various parts i need for this conversion. the only completed part so far is the extra large turret on the front-left tank in that picture.
Among the other tanks which are complete are 3 Leman Russ and a Baneblade. The Baneblade is also covered in rivets. As i recall a fraction over 2200 of them which was really fun(!)
Some of you might be wondering "why did he count them" because when you're doing this for a while, you begin to wonder, and wondering leads to wanting to know, which is frequently a mistake.
My Aim is that by the end of February to have a complete platoon. Thats a command squad, 5 troop squads, 5 heavy weapon squads and 2 special weapon squads. The tanks...? will come with time. It's actually not all that impossible to achieve, all bar 2 heavy squads and the command squad are done, requiring nothing more than touching up here and there and sealing.
*** SKIP POINT***
If you've made it this far and haven't skilled through, well done. Hopefully you might think i've done a decent job with painting those few tanks at least, if you skipped, at least you're here.
You want more thing? I went to Dreamhack (as my blog once showed) and MineCon, i should really finish posting about those... I need to redo the network in the house, which is probably blog worthy, as well as the TV setup with the new unit. Theres probably more too, who know. Food? Yeah probably food.
Thats enough for now, its almost getting productive here.
Well its a nice idea anyway. On with the new stuff.
If you dont care for Warhammer, then you might as well skip this, as its pretty much all about that for this post. You have been warned. I assure you, there will be some variation coming shortly. Skip to the end and see what else i'm going to maybe forget to post about thats happened since I last did anything here.
For the couple of years or so i've been making an Imperial Guard army, i say making, i've been rebuilding one I had some time ago and adding to it for the new rules. Surprisingly ignoring a game for a decade results in the rules changing dramatically.
After much pondering and delay in actually doing anything at all to make them line up in a coherent fashion i've decided on my company colours and markings. Which is a fairly big step in actually finishing models. For sometime i've had Red and Blue pegged as the first Platoon colours, but other than that, I've been indecisive. Blue is the overall company colour, and Red the platoon colour. In addition, this will be the Cadian 83rd Mobile Infantry. With that, every squad that can be, will have a dedicated transport available to them to use. That means a chimera for every command squad and regular troop squad in the company.
With the potential for 6 platoons, one command squad and 5 infantry squads in each one, that makes for 36 Chimeras. Sigh. This would be awesome, had i not made a fatal mistake when painting some of my tanks to paint each of the rivets in the hull silver. 724 rivets PER Chimera. So far, I have 4.
Granted i've actually got a couple more that either need building or painting, but this is at least the ones i've finished. Still, this amounts to roughly 2900 rivets. Fortunately, i've also finished the troops to go with these, but i'll post them another time.
I also dont actually need 36 of these, as due to various other choices i have for the army, i will (for now at least) be limiting it, if i can call it that, to 4 platoons, which is a mere 24, not including a couple other ones for company command squads and commissars.
The company command one wont be standard however, and i'm trying to collect various parts i need for this conversion. the only completed part so far is the extra large turret on the front-left tank in that picture.
Among the other tanks which are complete are 3 Leman Russ and a Baneblade. The Baneblade is also covered in rivets. As i recall a fraction over 2200 of them which was really fun(!)
Some of you might be wondering "why did he count them" because when you're doing this for a while, you begin to wonder, and wondering leads to wanting to know, which is frequently a mistake.
My Aim is that by the end of February to have a complete platoon. Thats a command squad, 5 troop squads, 5 heavy weapon squads and 2 special weapon squads. The tanks...? will come with time. It's actually not all that impossible to achieve, all bar 2 heavy squads and the command squad are done, requiring nothing more than touching up here and there and sealing.
*** SKIP POINT***
If you've made it this far and haven't skilled through, well done. Hopefully you might think i've done a decent job with painting those few tanks at least, if you skipped, at least you're here.
You want more thing? I went to Dreamhack (as my blog once showed) and MineCon, i should really finish posting about those... I need to redo the network in the house, which is probably blog worthy, as well as the TV setup with the new unit. Theres probably more too, who know. Food? Yeah probably food.
Thats enough for now, its almost getting productive here.
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