Hi Robin.
Looks fantastic. another great update to give inspiration to us all of what can be done. keep the updates coming Ian.

As I mentioned much earlier, I found the process of wire brushing the tuna tin sheets was very wearing on the steel brushes. The one I had had for many years (but very little used) was completely worn down by producing only a quarter of the necessary armour plates. I had ordered a pack of ten more brushes on Ebay from China but due to some mix up in the postal service (either their end or over here, I’ve no idea which) the ruddy things arrived a week after the build was completed – the company in China posted them the day after they were ordered! In the meantime I managed to get another brush in a set of three from the local Toolshed shop, (only one was the circular disk kind that I wanted!) In the final stages of construction with only the right hand Pauldron and the lowest sections of the skirt to go, already made but awaiting the brushing and polishing, I discovered a little trick that would have made the whole process much easier (and quicker!)
As you can see in Photo 13, I experimented on a strip of unused tuna tin and discovered that the ‘steel’ looking finish on the inside of the tin can be burned away with the application of intense heat. I used my very handy Iroda micro-jet gizmo, bought from Maplin some years ago for less than a fiver, you just drop a disposable lighter into the handle and press down the trigger to turn the lighter into a high intensity gas jet – it’s a brilliant little tool and much cheaper to run than the commercial gas jet alternatives. After discovering that the steel effect is actually some kind of protective lacquer, once burnt away it becomes more brittle and can be wire brushed off far easier. The first part of the actual armour to ‘volunteer’ for the treatment was the bottom front section of the skirt as shown in Photo 14. This piece had already been half stripped down to the bare metal the old way (on the right hand side in this shot) so the heat was applied to the left hand side only. The lacquer has bubbled up and blackened as shown here. I was a little worried at this point as you can see that the heat has travelled across the metal into the polished side as far as that dark band just past the centre. There was no need for concern however (just as well!) as the band came off with wire brushing just as easily as the burnt lacquer. This is being removed in Photo 15 and, after polishing up, the section was added on to Frederick in Photo 16. This is the one where the flash accidentally went off but this does serve to show the difference between the blue-grey enamel washed leg armour and the bare silver leafed torso much clearer. In the next shot in Photo 17, all the silver gilding has been given the first coat of the wash, whilst Photo 18 illustrates the leather leg straps placed in position over the mail, and attached to the plate armour with the filed down brass pins. The left shoulder was finally ‘mailed-up’ as shown in Photo 19, the difference in the appearance of the linked rings and simply butted rings can be seen clearly here, as can the metal ‘mini-Couter’ on the elbow which replaced the filed off moulded original. This was made ages ago, but was only able to be permanently fitted now.
Now came the fitting of the first of the Pauldron armour plate sets which, I have to admit, I made a complete pigs ear of completing! It ended up fine, but the second one was handled in what was almost the reverse of this one, and that was a doddle! In Photo 20, the thread for securing the Pauldron has been passed through the two small holes drilled in the breast and back plates and tied off inside. The thread itself was nicked from Victory’s stock of rigging threads, with the ends stiffened with super-glue before passing it through the holes. After a drop of super-glue on the knot, the loop was pulled back through the holes leaving the knotted end snug against the inside. The shoulder armour is secured to the torso by a leather strap which was riveted to the inside of the plates with a pair of holes punched in the end to take the threads (leather laces in the original I believe). The two leather straps are shown in Photo 21 with a couple of cut off brass pins to keep the holes open until needed. The straps were super-glued to the inside tops of the Pauldrons but before they could be attached it was necessary to first add on the under arm strap which holds the shoulder section in place against the rest of the armour. In Photo 22, the first of these straps is shown up against the Pauldron (this is actually the right shoulder piece as I forgot to take the photos for the first one!) Notice the improved rim to the bottom edge of the metal in all three of the next shots, since the super-glued rim of solder did come away during the polishing, I took the opportunity to try and ‘nip’ the rim into shape using the long nosed pliers instead – the result was a much more ‘in scale’ rim than the first attempt and came in really useful after I discovered the burning technique (the solder rim would NOT have appreciated that! The yellow arrow points to the previously drilled tiny hole for the strap’s brass pin, shown fixed in place in Photo 23.
This is where it all got complicated. Try as I might, despite repeatedly stiffening the ends of the threads with super-glue, I just couldn’t get the things to pass back through the holes in the leather straps. In the end, on this first shoulder I applied super-glue to the inside of the leather strap, effectively turning it solid, and once dry drilled out two larger holes to get the threads through and tie them off as shown in Photo 24. As I mentioned before, it actually turned out I was doing the whole thing the wrong way round so in the next instalment we’ll see how it should have been done!!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Thanks Robin for continuing to update your build diary of this build.

I am still enjoying reading how you achieved what you did

Yet another brilliant update Robin lovely work

Rgd Martyn

Grateful thanks again to Martyn and Ian! Just a couple more installments to go now. This one brings the actual figure to a close and the next one will concentrate on the scenic base to finish off!

Photos 13 and 14 show the rear of the Fauld or skirt armour with the two metal replacement plates attached. The upper one is part of the main armour and is glued on with help from two of the brass pin rivets to keep it in position. The lowest plate is that ‘replacement for the replacement’ mentioned earlier, this one is a ‘free swinging’ plate, not riveted to the main body but attached by a pair of leather straps as shown here. I would suspect that this plate would simply ‘swing up’ out of the way when Frederick was sat in his saddle, the medieval war horse saddle was not a flattened cushion like a modern saddle but had a high front and back both for protection from blows aimed from the ground and also to take some of the shock of impact from using the lance in combat. Photos 15 and 16 then illustrate the separated ‘hip guard’ plate, which is also suspended via a pair of leather straps. Strangely, the rear strap is riveted to the plate above like the larger plate but the front strap is riveted to the plate above that one – possibly sharing the weight of this piece of armour between the two lames instead of it all pulling on one section?
To protect Frederick’s vulnerable armpits whilst raising his sword or shield arm, his armour is equipped with disk shaped protectors called Rondels. These are fixed to the shoulder Pauldrons by a simple leather strap allowing the Rondel to just ‘dangle underneath. When the arm is raised up, the Rondel moves up to cover the armpit (although it is still protected by the mail of course, but the mail won’t stop a bodkin point or a Stiletto type dagger thrust!) I used the kit parts for the Rondels, they were given a spray of the matt black car primer followed by the silver leaf and a coat of the Humbrol Blue-Grey Enamel wash as with all the rest of the plastic armour parts. The two Rondels were then super glued to a single thin strip of the skived leather as shown in Photo 17 before being separated at the cuts marked in the photo. All that remained then was to apply a small drop of super glue on the outward side of the leather and insert the strap up under the Pauldron, keeping it in position for a few seconds with tweezers until the glue was set, the result is shown in Photo 18.
The last two sections of Frederick’s armour to be attached were the Tassets, the upper thigh guards which were attached with a pair of leather straps on each as shown in Photo 19. These were the pieces which, in the original kit parts, were moulded with only the inner strap present. The two straps are not identical however, the inner ones seen here have two brass rivets at the top whilst the outer straps (not visible here, one is hidden under the sword belt and the other is ‘round the corner) have only one rivet. To save drilling lots of holes in the metal Lame, only one of the double rivets is actually passing through the armour – the other one is a dummy, just the brass pin head glued on to the strap!
Finally for this instalment, we finish off the sword and dagger belts. The final composite Photo 20 shows the applied belt system from two views. The load bearing part of the belt consists of two individually buckled straps; one of which circles the armour’s waist, with a second, longer one which hangs at an angle and carries the actual weight of the sword and dagger. These were made from the stiffer ‘cow hide’ leather which was skived down until it was as thin as possible to allow it to hang naturally after a painting with the leather softener. Once the belts were in position I offered up the suspension straps already fitted to the scabbard rings and positioned the scabbard at a good angle against the body. Once satisfied, I marked the straps against the belt and trimmed off the excess leather before piercing a small hole in the straps at the top. I could then drill through the hole and the belt underneath, eventually drilling through the plastic armour as well. Then a full sized brass pin was pushed through all three layers securing the strap to the belt (and body) – rivets in leather are larger than those in metal to avoid the leather tearing under stress. On the left side photo you can clearly see the difference in size between the full size pin on the belt and the filed down ones on the armour! Now, the belt was supposed to thread through the dagger ‘frog’ when I fitted it onto the torso – wouldn’t you know I completely forgot to add it on! No problem however, I just razor slit the back of the frog, hooked it over the belt and super glued it back together again. The weight baring part of the medieval sword belt was traditionally far longer than it needed to be to wear the sword around the waist, as you can see here, Frederick has a good two foot of spare belt dangling down. This was to allow the belt to be extended so that the sword could also be worn over the shoulder like a Baldrick when required. Much later, for instance in the English Civil War period, most swords were worn on a Baldrick, the earlier sword belt having fallen into disuse with the passing of full armour.
And that is it for Frederick himself! In the next and final installment, creating the base and groundwork for the ‘Field of Oats’

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Many thanks there to Ian! Sorry for the delay in finishing up dear old Frederick - been having trouble with a winter bug and migraines lately but here he is at last!
I've crammed the whole base building into one installment so I'm afraid it is a bit 'wordy' but I hope the updated photos at the end will make up for that! (Sorry I couldn't get his legs in, the backdrop wasn't big enough! )

Many years ago I was given a beautiful slice of Agate stone as seen in Photo 1. It came with a little clear plastic supporting stand visible at the bottom of the stone but a little while after I managed to pick up a lovely octagonal wooden stand to display the piece on. I’m not exactly sure where I got it from, but I’m fairly certain it was from one of the Model Exhibitions held in the Guildhall down here in Plymouth. Anyway, after all those years I’m afraid Mr Agate has lost his plinth – I need it for Frederick (and it’s just the right size!). Photo 2 shows the wooden plinth after a good dusting and a quick clean up with a damp cloth – and it needed it too! The first task was to remove Frederick from his temporary base – another block of plain wood used to hold him steady for the various adding on procedures, pose him where I wanted him to stand and then mark the positions of his two metal rods coming out of his feet. From those marks I could then drill out the base to fit those same rods in again. I chose to do this with the bench press drill as shown in Photo 3, (I’m not the most accurate at free-hand 90 degree hole drillings!)
With the holes drilled and cleaned out, the base was then covered in some of Mum’s cling-film, this would allow me to model the ground work, and do all the painting steps without worrying about messing up the surface of the wood. The basic ground build up was composed of DAS Modelling Clay, an air drying material which I used for the sandbags in the Scramble diorama. This was a new pack, freshly opened as shown in Photo 4. I sliced off about a half inch thick slab of the clay and using a piece of aluminium tubing, rolled the clay out into a sheet of around a quarter inch or 5mm thickness. (I must remember to get a rolling pin in the Poundshop, I’ll need that tube for something one day!) A pair of cocktail sticks were inserted into the drilled peg holes in the base, and the sheet of clay was dropped over the top to lie flat on the cling film. The edges were then trimmed back with an old kitchen knife to leave the clay as shown in Photo 5. The ‘flat’ clay effect was then removed with some very basic stippling accomplished with an old toothbrush as shown in Photo 6. This is simply a case of ‘dabbing’ the bristles of the brush down into the clay with the minimum of force required to make an impression, push too hard and the brush will just embed itself and remove large clods of clay! Once the stippling was done, the two cocktail sticks were removed temporarily so that I could take Frederick and gently push his feet with their brass pegs down into the holes to leave a pair of footprints in the clay, this would ensure that he would fit exactly back in position once the base was finished and would also stand ‘in’ the ground, not perched over the top of it! With the basic terrain texture complete, I went back to my store of Woodland Scenics Talus (assorted rocks) and selected a few bits and pieces to represent the small stones that would be un-earthed by the medieval plough and/or weather out of the cultivated soil. These were pushed in to the clay surface and left overnight for the clay to air dry. The difference in colour between the fresh clay and the dried can be clearly seen in Photos 7 and 8. The final preparation was completed by a good thick coat of Admiralty Yellow Ochre acrylic paint as seen in Photo 9. Any loose looking stones were removed first and carefully arranged around the base so I could relocate them back in their original positions later. After leaving the paint to dry overnight, the following evening the ground work was given a light wash with Citadel Skaven Brown acrylic ink to bring out the textures and shadows as can be seen in Photo 10. Frederick’s footprints are also more evident in this shot! After the depth-adding shadows, the next step was to add the lighter highlighting using a mixture of the Yellow Ochre and some Revell matt White acrylic, drybrushed over the ground texture. Before doing that however, the missing stones were glued back into position with super glue gel and then the whole of the groundwork was drybrushed as one, blending the stones back into the overall soil colour as shown in Photo 11. The final act for the ground was to add a subtle dusting of the Carrs Mud powder to add the orangey brown tinges to the soil. The Carrs was originally bought for the Messines diorama and is still going strong! (Photo 12)
The last essential part of the base work was the stalks of ripening oats to represent the fields over which part of the battle took place. To start off, I needed to create the leaves for the oat plants. Photo 13 illustrates the beginning of my agricultural phase of the model with the first set of leaves being scissor-cut from a piece of yellow crepe paper. I hunted everywhere to find that crepe – the design for creating the oats was based partly on a site I came across on the web for making scale corn plants for doll scale farm houses. It was only after I began making up the plants that I discovered that I should have been after raffia NOT crepe! Still, this method worked really well so it didn’t matter in the end! Each oat stalk has three sets of leaves, smallest at the top just below the oat husks or seeds, each set at right angles to the one above. In order to make the actual oat stalks with the ‘ears’ of oat I went for the most natural looking material I could find – someone else had done all the work on designing this and I can’t better His work! What I’m using is a species of wild grass – I haven’t a clue what the species name is, but I found this whilst on my walks to the bus stop up the hill when my back was ‘done in’ and I couldn’t ride my bike to my caring job. Along the grass verges were patches of this wild grass and as they turned a golden yellow in the summer the seeds looked just like miniature oats! I duly collected a few handfuls of the stuff, each one carefully selected for the best looking ‘heads’. The first batch didn’t go to plan however, I tried to preserve the grasses with diluted pva but all that did was to stick all the seed heads into one thick stem – not the ‘wispy’ oats blowing in the wind I wanted! I then sent off for an aerosol can of matt varnish and that (when sparingly applied) did the job and I ended up with sealed grass stems still looking wispy at the ends (see Photo 15) Before the previously cut leaves were attached they first needed to be given a brushing over with neat pva glue as shown in Photo 14. This was simply brushed over the crepe paper leaf with a stiff bristled brush and immediately after the application the bottom of the leaf was gently lifted up and the still tacky end rolled between the thumb and forefinger. This produces a tightly rolled ‘stem’ which is then used to attach the leaf to the natural grass stalk with more pva. (The rolling action to create the stem was discovered by pure accident – I was actually trying to get a sticky leaf off of my fingers at the time!) As you can see in Photo 15, some of the ‘ears’ did come loose during the sticking process but these were saved up and applied to the base groundwork for extra effect. At the time Frederick was completed for the competion (before I blew it!) he appeared as in Photo 16. Afterwards however I discovered that oat plants are not as tall as I thought – on average about four to five feet, not the six to seven I had modelled them at! I therefore trimmed them down a bit and, while I was at it also decided to airbrush the lower halves of the plants to give them back a little more green colour. This would also have the effect of making them two toned – green at the bottom and ripening yellow at the top which looked much better as you can see in Photo 17. I would have loved to have put in twice the number of oat stalks to give the impression of Frederick standing and fighting through a dense field of crops, the trouble was, the more oats the less Frederick can be seen! In the end, I stopped at four as a compromise. The last act I needed to do to put Frederick in the middle of his most famous battle was to ‘bloody’ him up a bit. Originally I was going to put a lot of blood spatter over his torso too which would probably have been more realistic but just as with the oats, its possible to get carried away so for best effect I’ve given him a bloodied sword and some ‘arterial spray’ over his shield. For the blood, I popped into the local Games Workshop store (they’re a pretty bloodthirsty lot! ) and found a pot of acrylic called “Blood for the Blood God” – and you can’t get much bloodier than that! This is a really nice paint to simulate blood and gore which stays looking wet after it has actually dried as you can see in Photo 18. The blood on the sword blade was applied with a small fine brush but for the shield I first experimented on a scrap of white card and found that by dipping a short, stiff bristled brush just into the paint and then carefully ‘aiming’ the brush at the card and using my thumb to pull the bristles back I could literally ‘flick’ the paint over to the card to create a realistic ‘blood spatter’ effect (yes, I watched the original CSI series too!) Once I’d got the hang of it, I used to same technique to flick the blood paint across the top left quarter of Frederick’s shield after first placing some paper tissue behind the shield so I didn’t spray Frederick as well. With the oats shortened and greened up a little, and the blood work done the final appearance of Frederick the Victorious was as shown in Photo 19.
I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed this build more than most others – I’ve learnt or developed so many more skills and techniques on Frederick, from working in leather and silver leafing to basic metalworking and even ‘horticulture’ and I would love to get back into this 1/12th scale for future projects.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this medieval epic as much as I enjoyed building it and to leave you all as I start getting to grips with this year’s project, here’s a little series of photos to end up with, showing my favourite Count of the Palatinate in the thick of battle!

So until “A Litter of Pups” is ready to start posting , Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Fantastic build and excellent build diary. Well done Robin.