Saturday 21 June 2008

Swedish Generals

These are Generals Klingspor & Aldercreutz proud commanding officers of my Swedish army. Both figures are actually AN102 Austrian General mounted holding map from the horse-attached series. Mr A (riding one of my famous rocking horses) has had a new head fitted and the map removed from his hands. In common with my other Swedes I refreshed the original paint job on these rather than strip them and start again, although they were in a pretty bad condition so it ended up being more of a re-paint.

I received these lads with the rest of my Swedish army from the USA last year. Their origin is a bit of a mystery. They are not vintage UK castings and neither are they Clayton castings or the more obscure Der Kriegspieler Napoleoniques. There are quite a few knock-off Hinton Hunt figures about and most of those were produced in the USA so it’s fairly safe to assume that someone slaved away over a hot kitchen stove to make these from original figures – I wonder if they felt guilty? Although not official castings they are probably at least 20 or so years old and the quality is good. The only annoying thing about them is the extra thick bases which make them taller than their genuine comrades.

Messer’s K & A look a bit glum possibly because they have only just heard that Russia has knocked Sweden out of the Euro 2008 football competition. Perhaps a new Russo-Swedish war is in the offing?

For more on my Swedes click here.

2 comments:

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

...that's quite a complex homecast if someone did do it - look at all those undercuts on the horse... back in the day, I did try homecasting myself using Airfix figures for the master - damn difficult, and the output was always rubbish! :o))

Stryker said...

Steve,
That's very interesting - I've never tried to cast figures myself so have no real idea about the complexities. I guess they could be a commercial copy. Harry Pearson's site does say that the Hintons suffered more than most from pirating.
Ian