Building - 28mm Ships

Tall Ships

Model sailing ships have always been  something that I have admired and never really owned.   The sight of those big sails and all that rigging just really captures a sense of adventure in me.   Whether its the Battle of Trafalgar of Pirates fighting off the Spanish Main it has been something I have longed to do in 28mm.

Thanks to Firelock Games, this is now easier to make a reality.  

Firelock Games

Of course there are other manufactures of suitable ship models but it seems to be s scale that has never really had a well publicised and easily available rule set...until now.

With Blood and Plunder Ship to Ship, Ship to Shore and Land battles can all be fought without tweeking or altering the rules.

Beasts of War have done an excellent job of showing demo games and terrain building videos and I highly recommend visiting their site and supporting all they do to promote games and share new developments in the gaming industry as a whole.

Beasts of War

Anyway,

My first ship was a wonderful model by

Laser Dream Works

Its a truly masterful piece of engineering and if you are after a true scale 28mm Ship I can highly recommend them.  They are lasercut and have good clear instructions.   

As you can see I got three different ships from Laser Dream works and started on the largest I had, the Wasp.

The kit went together really well and took the paint nicely

The actual build and painting of the model didn't take that long and before no time at all I found myself having to rig my first ever ship.

For the most part I used rigging string from a local model shop.  I didn't want to go too heavy with rigging as I still intended for the model to be a playable piece.  I figured that just enough to indicate there was a lot of rigging would suffice.

Its a great looking model that I really enjoyed but it wasn't too long before I realised it had one drawback.

This ship is Huge and there would be no way I could have a table big enough to field more than one of the monsters at a time and still have room for the ships to manoeuvre.  

Here it is on a 6' x 4' board to give you an idea of size.

So now its more of a display piece and I had to look elsewhere for something a bit smaller but still felt big.

Ainsty Castings do some mighty fine ships but being solid resin the postage to Western Australia is almost crippling, thankfully a friend mentioned that he had some that he was looking to get rid of.  

So quick as I could a grabbed them and also ordered a set of ships from Firelock Games.

I started painting up the Anisty Ships whilst waiting for the Firelock Games order to arrive.

As always I started with the largest and trickiest.  A 26 Gun ship that I thought would look good in Yellow and Black.  I'm not sure how accurate the colours will be for the Piratey period I fancy doing, but as long as it looks good on the table I'm happy with that.

Quickly after followed a much smaller sloop and a ship that just looked like a Merchant Ship to me.

I will post up how I did the sails soon as it was something I couldn't find any useful tutorials on but for now, some more pictures.