So as I mentioned in my last post, my US Airborne force only comes to 800pts, just shy of the 1K that I like to run in Bolt Action. So I decided to keep an eye out on eBay for a great deal on some second hand miniatures, just to boost the army up on a small budget. I soon found this listing with only a single bid, and decided to take a look. After studying the out of focus and upside down image, I eventually had to message the seller, since I couldn’t even tell if the miniatures were the metal models that I was looking for, or the newer plastic kit, which despite being great, depicts the US Airborne in late war gear, which doesn’t match my existing army. Luckily the models were metal, so I placed my bid Sunday evening, and yesterday I received the package…

Upon removing the outer tape and cardboard, I found a small tupperware, containing 10 models that could well have featured in this glorious video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3p_VuPIS2c

Once I’d got these models out of the box, I realised I hadn’t just got a selection of riflemen. The thick layers of paint were hiding 6 riflemen, a medic, a forward observer, and a bazooka team! A good result that makes this lot even better value, in terms of points per pound.

Obviously these paint jobs had to go, and so did the mismatch of horribly clunky bases, with far too much sand and even some two pence pieces instead of plastic bases. I resorted to the classic method of stripping: methylated spirits. There’s plenty of tutorials on how to strip miniatures all over the internet, so I won’t go into full detail here, but I will share some of my photos from the process.

After the second bath in the spirits, I managed to get enough paint off of the models to be happy to paint over them. First however, I started by rebasing them, since the original bases were a complete write off, and didn’t match my already decided scheme for this army. On the models that I have already completed and shared a few days ago, I actually textured the bases prior to priming them, so I repeated that process on these guys for consistency.

After giving the models a coat of GW’s chaos black primer, this is what the results were. Despite the camera struggling to pick up the detail of the pure black models, I was overall very happy with the finished results. Obviously these boys are not yet combat ready, but once I’ve got them painted to match the already completed portions of the army, they will be fit to fight another day!

As mentioned in the last post, stay tuned for more updates on this army as I work on them over the coming weeks!
-Alex