Lancers of the Guard

The Red Lancers have taken their place alongside the Polish Lancers to complete my unit of Lancers of the Guard.

The figures used for the full unit are:

1 x FN/40 Officer (mounted) charging

1 x FN/41 Trumpeter (mounted) charging

7 x FN/43 Lancer (mounted) charging

3 x FN/44 Lancer (mounted) charging with separate lance

(all the castings are vintage ones)

Thanks to Tony for kindly providing the last few figures I needed to complete this unit.

Red Lancer progress and revising the plan

The Red Lancers are finished and fully glossed up but not yet based. I’ve really enjoyed painting these so here is a sneak preview.

I have recently been taking a long hard look at the lead pile and considering it against what I’m ever likely to paint for this project. At best I manage 120 or so Hinton Hunts per year so unless I’m going to live a very long time (and retain reasonable eyesight throughout) it’s probably time to set some sensible limits.

With that in mind I have gone delete happy on my master-plan spreadsheet to bring the total ‘to do’ list down to around 500 figures. In doing this I have thought about likely scenarios in relation to what I can fit on my maximum 8’ x 4’ table. Waterloo is top of my list, and it looks like I only need 4 more units for a scaled-down representation of that battle, so the immediate plan is to fill in those gaps.

Beyond that I need to balance out the various army OOB’s and make sure that I paint all the favourites in the pile making sure the vintage figures take priority.

Red Lancer Command

I’ve just completed this officer and trumpeter for the Guard Red Lancers. These figures are unique across all the Hinton Hunt ranges being the only cavalry command figures that Marcus Hinton produced. It’s a bit odd that no others were made but perhaps it was assumed that wargamers enjoyed the challenge of making their own conversions.

Left: FN/40 Officer, Right: FN/41 Trumpeter. The trumpeter is painted to the Hinton Hunt painting instructions whilst the officer is (mostly) from Funken.

Those of you who follow the blog will realise that by expanding the Eclaireurs to a full unit I have been left with a single troop of six Guard Polish Lancers. My initial thought was to expand the Poles to a full twelve figures, but I wanted to try my hand at the Red Lancers so have settled on a combined unit of six figures of each. This does of course have an historical justification in that the Polish Lancers and Red Lancers did fight together at Waterloo.