Just five days to go on the sale…
Communications Breakdown
As you will have seen from Phil’s post, we had a rather inconvenient internet failure last week. Apparently when our new router was installed earlier in the year, the engineer left the cable to the old one unterminated, which was causing lots of noise on the system and affecting the rest of the street and surrounding area. So last week they fixed the issue by essentially blocking us off, rather than tracing the real source of the problem – and then acting surprised when we complained about losing our service!
However, a new engineer visited yesterday, got straight to the root of the problem and, after a bit of rewiring (accompanied by a modicum of swearing) had us back online within an hour.
I’ve caught up with emails again, placed several urgent orders for packaging and other supplies, paid the bills, processed all the orders that have arrived in the meantime and we’re pretty much back to normal. I’m about 3-4 days behind on sale orders, or, putting a positive spin on things, most (not quite all) orders placed before the 28th have been posted.
I’ve also double checked all orders and issued refunds to three or four people that hadn’t had the sale discount deducted. I’ve also had a couple of orders with the incorrect shipping options selected, so in those cases we will need to issue invoices to cover the extra postage costs.
Onto something a bit more relevant that might actually interest some of you – here’s another of our new models to look forward to next year – or part of it at any rate. This is the hull master of the Neo-Soviet Mammont heavy tank, which is another 6mm model that I’ve scaled up to 15mm. It’s been restyled to match the other recent Neo-Soviet releases, and the hull will be in five parts – the main body of the hull plus four track units. As for the turret, that has already gone for moulding so I’ll show that off once we have castings. Phil delivered a master mould earlier this week, so if I have a bit of time I’ll photograph some of the new bits from that.
Posted in 15mm SF, Updates and General Waffle
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Incommunicado
My colleague Mr Francis is temporarily finding himself back in the dark ages with no broadband access and limited ability to reply to emails!! He is expecting that normality will be resumed by the end of the week.
In the meantime our Christmas sale is still ongoing and he will be keeping his nose firmly pressed against the grindstone casting and posting out orders as they come in.
Posted in Updates and General Waffle
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Sale Update
The sale has gone off with a bang and a veritable Niagara of orders. I’m trying to keep up as best as I can, but at the moment I’m running a couple of days behind. All orders (with a couple of exceptions) to the end of Monday have been completed and I’m roughly halfway through Tuesday’s ones – although there’s been a slight hiccup with a minor broadband issue that prevented me doing today’s post in time, so they’ll have to go to the post office tomorrow instead. I generally tackle them in strict order of arrival, first-come-first-served, although if I get two orders for similar items then I’ll do those at the same time as it’s generally more efficient to do so.
Since we have no new releases during the sale, we like to post pictures of new items that you can look forward to in the New Year. A box of bits turned up from the printer at the end of last week and one of those was our first brand new item for the 15mm Hammer’s Slammers range. It’s an uparmoured version of the M2A4F command tank (designated the M2A4FUA). I’ve sat it on a standard blower hull for the photo since I didn’t have an uparmoured hull handy. The turret is a brand new 3D designed piece rather than a conversion of the existing command tank turret, and should be available sometime in January.
Posted in 15mm SF, Hammer's Slammers, Previews, Updates and General Waffle
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Better Late Than Never .. We’re Go For The Sale !
After a rather frustrating day of no broadband (it’s finally been restored at 5pm), we can finally launch the Brigade Models Christmas Sale 2017. It’s our usual tried-and-trusted format, a blanket 15% discount across most of our ranges which will run for a month until midnight on Sunday December 17th.
For full details, click here, or the image above, and you’ll be taken to the website where you can start saving.
Posted in Special Offers
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The Slammers Arrive
It’s taken a week or three, but the first of the 15mm Hammer’s Slammers models have now arrived on the website. To start with we’ve put up the Slammers themselves, including both the original vehicles and the uparmoured Friesland Defence Force models, plus a couple of other blower tank variants from other mercenary units.
All of the resin parts come from fresh moulds – as we posted earlier, we had some issues with the original Ainsty moulds not liking the resin we use, so it seemed simpler to remould pretty much everything (one of two of the newer moulds behaved OK so we can still use those until they expire).
The website has been given a thorough going over too, with all of our Hammer’s Slammers models, both 6mm and 15mm, being pulled out onto their own dedicated section of the website rather than being mixed in with our other 6mm and 15mm ranges (this is purely for convenience so that the Slammers stuff is easy to find). This has meant a bit of upheaval, with some items changing product code and the files moving about on the website – which inevitably means that many of the links from the blog will no longer work, although I will find and fix as many as I can. I’m still tweaking/fixing the website and blog, so links and pages may appear, disappear, break, get fixed and generally be all over the place for a little while…
The other, non-Slammers vehicles – the GD-1000 series GEVs and Dragoon half-tracks – will be on the website as soon as we can manage it. We have brand new moulds for the half-track hulls but we are making fresh moulds for the metal parts of both sets of vehicles which will be a week or two. And we haven’t forgotten the decal sheets, they need sorting through to determine what levels of stock we have.
So, without further ado, here’s a list of what’s immediately available:
HS15-111 – M2A4 Blower Tank – £9.00
HS15-111a – M2A4F Command Tank – £9.00
HS15-111b – M2A4UA Uparmoured Tank – £9.00
HS15-112 – M9A1 Combat Car – £5.00
HS15-112a – M9A4 Command Car – £4.00
HS15-112d – M9A7 Uparmoured Combat Car – £5.00
HS15-113 – A21 Jeep – £2.50
HS15-114 – M53 20cm Artillery Hog – £10.00
HS15-115 – E8 ‘Wrenchmobile’ – £10.00
Lightning Division
HS15-1711 – M2A7 Blower Tank – £9.00
Waldheim Dragoons
HS15-1911 – M2A2 Blower Tank – £9.00
And, just to see who reads all the way to the end … our now-traditional end-of-year sale starts this Friday – so prime those credit cards !
Posted in 15mm SF, 6mm SF, Hammer's Slammers
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Shapeways Shipping
This will be of interest to UK customers – Shapeways have lowered their shipping rates to the UK. I’m not sure if it’s the same to other regions, it’s worth checking their website. This could make it a bit more affordable to pickup some of the 3D printed items from our Shapeways store.
Posted in Shapeways, Shipping Stories
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Bolt from the Blue
Today’s new release is a set of 6mm vehicles neatly connected to our recent acquisition of the 15mm Hammer’s Slammers range of models, although it has to be said that these new ones were in place and complete before the 15mm deal was mooted. I created the 3D masters of all of these vehicles from scratch by referencing 15mm castings from Ainsty, but ironically just three days ago we were provided with the original data files for the larger models, which would have saved me an awful lot of work ! C’est la vie …
What we have are large half-tracks for the Thunderbolt Division, a veteran combined arms formation led by Colonel Chiro. There are five variants of the Dragoon series of vehicles, which all use the same chassis with different turrets – these include powergun armed Tank/ICV, tank destroyer, missile-carrying Schlepper, anti-aircraft/anti-missile Calliope and infantry-carrying M/ICV (there is also a command variant in the detachment list, this is externally identical to the M/ICV). The models are available individually, and we’ve also created two packs representing the Panzer Grenadier and Panzer detachments on the Thunderbolt playsheet. The playsheet also lists the smaller Viking recce half-track – this will be available early in the new year, along with the 15mm version – you might be able to spot one or two Vikings in the background of the photos.
We’ve got hold of a few copies of the Crucible rulebook, so these are now listed (under our 15mm range) on the website.
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- Hammer’s Slammers:The Crucible
And as a final bonus, here’s a new vehicle for the Slammers themselves – the E8 ‘Wrenchmobile’ recovery vehicle. This is a large flat-bed GEV used for fixing disabled vehicles in the field, and it can also recover combat cars if necessary (blower tanks are too heavy even for the E8). In emergencies they have also been deployed by the Slammers as very large infantry carriers.
HSC-006 – Hammer’s Slammers:Crucible Rulebook – £25.00
HS-1615 – E8 Wrenchmobile – £2.00
HS-1801 – Thunderbolt Panzer Grenadier Detachment – £7.25
HS-1802 – Thunderbolt Panzer Detachment – £8.00
HS-1811 – Br59 Dragoon 2 T/ICV – £1.25
HS-1812 – Br66 Tank Destroyer – £1.25
HS-1813 – Br58SM Schlepper – £1.25
HS-1814 – Br54/56 Dragoon 2 M/ICV – £1.25
HS-1815 – Br57 Calliope – £1.25
And work is progressing nicely on the 15mm Slammers – the first of these will be on the website next week if all goes to plan.
Posted in 6mm SF, Hammer's Slammers, New Releases
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Slammer Update
So amongst other things, over the past couple of weeks since SELWG I’ve been trying out the moulds for the Hammer’s Slammers models we recently acquired.
Some have been fine, while others don’t seem to like our resin too much – it seems to grip the rubber and rip bits off them. This was once a blower tank hull…
The problem has been compounded by a lack of resin – our usual supplier normally manages next-day deliveries, but this latest order has taken almost two weeks, which means I’ve had to conserve my stocks to cover website orders, instead of being able to cast lots of Slammers models (and blower tanks hulls needs lots of resin); yesterday afternoon, when I hoped to be in full production mode, I’d completely run out. However, I have managed to gather a bit of stock for Crisis tomorrow – I have some combat cars, a handful of blower tanks with a selection of turrets, a few artillery Hogs and a few jeeps. Not as much as I’d hoped, but enough to be getting on with.
We’ve started remoulding all of the vehicles in our normal rubber which we know works with our resin, so with a bit of luck we’ll have the first of them on our website in the next week or two.
Right, it’s off to the channel tunnel for me, to catch a train under the sea and then drive up to Antwerp for our last show of the year, Crisis.
Posted in 15mm SF, Hammer's Slammers, Updates and General Waffle
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Cruiser Reinforcements
Today we have a couple of additions to our EuroFed spaceship range, replacing another two of the older range of models. These should have been released a week ago, but my broadband went down and I couldn’t upload them…
Both are cruisers – the Valmy and Condorcet, medium and light cruisers respectively. Going back many, many years, the original Condorcet was the first spaceship model we ever made (and somewhere in Brigade towers is the silicon rubber mould – now black with age and use – from which we drop cast them over my kitchen stove !). These versions retain the same size and layout but with improved detailing to match the other new EuroFed ships.
SFS-420 – Valmy class Cruiser – £2.25
SFS-422 – Condorcet class Cruiser – £1.75
We’ll have stock of these at Crisis on Saturday, along with a massive selection of our other stuff – see you there !
Posted in Updates and General Waffle
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