"Worst Accidents With My Miniatures" Topic

Three stories of survival when my miniatures were sorely damaged. Here:
link

What happened? See my photos and conversation to find out.

Respectfully,
Bill P.
Chronicler for The Adventures of General Pettygree

Bravo!

It is a , I went into my garage one day to find that a cabinet in which I had shelves of figures had collapsed, 28 TYW stuff everywhere in various states o f damge! Took me a few years to finally get them sorted and I now have a decent Wargames shed with loads of good storage!

Tally Ho!

I have a 'collection' of about 200 Imrie-Risley Revolutionary War figures which I painted and organized for presentation in my history classes in the late 1990s.

They were boxed up and stored after I finished using them and I took out the boxes from a closet as I was interested in displaying them in the house. Both large boxes had crashed and most of the miniatures incurred some damage, most easily addressed which I'm doing now. The worst damage was to a field piece where the axel broke off and to a gun team horse whose fetlock broke off.

They are now being sorted and repaired, the hardest thing to do being matching the parts to the correct figures, especially horse reins.

I found a replacement for the horse on ebay and the field piece can be easily repaired. Some bayonets were broken off the muskets, but the collection is slowly going into its new case.

I organized the figures into a two-company infantry battalion, a cavalry company, an artillery company, and a company of light infantry-all Continentals. The uniforms are mixed, a few in waistcoats, some in hunting shirts, and the rest in 'regulation' uniform.

Unfortunately, they are no long being produced but some can be found on ebay.

Interestingly, because they were in boxes, there was quite literally no dust.

Between children, dogs and the odd construction/storage incident my armies took enough hits so that I temporarily retired my Renaissance and ACW armies. The most dramatic (although not the worst) was when someone left the basement door open when I was having a basement wargame. The dogs came in from the rain, raced downstairs and between feet and ears and tails we had the Great Hound Massacre.

I am in the process of painting all the Prussian units that were present at Waterloo.
On Sunday, i finished the last of the Artillery. Monday i finished the bases and Tuesday i painted the bases.
This morning I spray varnished them outside as it was a dry day.
Then the rain came! its ruined all the bases. As i type this, they are in the oven hopefully drying off. If that doesn't work, then i'm going to have to rebase the lot!
Arghhhhhh

Once a long time ago I mistook a can of spray paint for dull coat and silver coated a newly painted Confederate regiment – good lesson to check before you spray

Also have had a spill episode when I dropped a couple of SYW units – one standard bearer snapped off at the feet but some superglue, green stuff and paint got him back on his feet

I spilled molten lead on myself and got 3rd degree burns on hand and up my arm while casting using Prince August molds.

Had the box containing old figures ready for melting down, next to the one containing loose figures waiting to be flashed/primed/painted etc.
Guess which one got tipped into the melting pot by mistake…I can still feel the little eyes staring accusingly.

@ Virtualscratchbuilder – Once when doing some testing of moulds, had liquid metal in a pan ready to tip in. It being a typical, oppressively hot day in the tropics, I was soaked with sweat. As I went to pick the pan up I shook my head to clear my eyes and sweat hit the molten metal. That stuff went everywhere; I feel your pain.

Try dropping a tray of 16 painted, rigged and based 1200 scale Age of Sail ship models to the pavement from a height of about 4 feet.

Then there was the tray of about thirty 2000 scale Valiant Age of Sail ship models, likewise all painted rigged and based, carefully secured on the back seat of my car, only to have some SoB cut me off and nearly hit me on the highway. It was not pretty.

B

Having conversations about such things could make them happen….

Knock on wood but 39 years nothing worse than dropping a stand and having to glue the figure back on the stand.

Two of the lads (35+ years of age) decided to have a little wrestling match next to the table holding the 25mm 1200 fig Franco-Prussian armies I bought from Larry Brom 30 years ago. The armies were airborne for a pretty good distance. All have been repaired by the two lads except for 10 cavalry figs which went missing. Hope to replace them soon.

Dropped from shoulder height a tray of 4 corps Prussian Naps.
onto the basement floor. I went upstairs disgusted and didn't go down until a week went by. Cement floors are so forgiven!

I have no stories that can compare to these. For that I am very grateful.

I had one of those big army cases full of NKE soldiers. Hundreds of them. It slipped out of my hand as I got to the top of my friends basement stairs!All I could do was watch as it bounced and tumbled down the stairs. I was terrified of what I would find when I got home. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I did spend quite a bit of time, painting, gluing and rebasing to get it back into fighting prime again.

I've had a few mishaps with boxed minis but nothing horrific, however back when we played original D&D almost every week, one of our group (we lived thru-out the DFW Metroplex) amassed a large selection of painted figures for many of the monsters; we'd played for hours into the evening & he left first having miles to drive home on I-35. He put his boxes of minis on the roof of his car, forgot about them, & they were scattered into the night. We searched the roadside the next day but found very few figures & neither of the boxes.

In the 1980' when stationed in the UK. Was playing in my barn with a couple other GI's and excited to show off my first professionally painted Dutch Lancers (old MInifigs, but my pride back then. Like above, tripped on the stairs, damaging several of them. What a disappointment.

My worst accident was when my dad decided he needed more room in his second garage, so he cleared some space by throwing out some of my classic board games as well as my 15mm Napoleonic collection of Brits, KGL, and Portuguese.

This thread is painful to read.

I have been fortunate, except for the occasional dropped figure which mysteriously missed my entire carpeted floor and struck the only bare concrete in the work area, 2inches by 2inches. I have seen an occasion when, during a convention in St. Paul, MN a gamer leaned way out over the large table to move some figures and managed to impale himself with a bayonet on a stand or French Napoleonic infantry. When he stood erect he had the stand still stuck into his left breast, ouch!

Did you check the 'bayoneter' figure to see if it had an evil grin on its face?

Maybe the time one of my preteens caused three eye-level and higher shelves of fully rigged 1/600 European ironclads to pancake collapse as they all fell to the floor.

I made the mistake of leaving a box containing a dozen 1/1200 scale sailing ship models on top of my gaming room refrigerator. My son decided to get a drink out of the it and slammed the door afterwards. Next thing I knew the box of models was up side down on the floor. I now have a dozen prison hulks.

Blutarski,

I have had the privilege to game with your work and both those instances are not accidents…they were tragedies! I can't imagine after all that gorgeous work.

Chuckaroobob, that wrestling debacle, and with Larry's FPW Army to boot, wasn't just a disaster,that was a shameful crime!

Sam

Your stories are very interesting. Gee, I thought I might be in a minority. Nope.
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If you go back to the blog story link, you'll have an opportunity to read a lot more. Amazing stories.
link
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Thank you for participating.
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Respectfully,
Bill P.
Chronicler for The Adventures of General Pettygree

Hi Bismarck,
I was certainly unhappy about the 1200 scale disaster (which was solely my own damned fault), but my acquisition last year of s fleet of lovely ships from one of your distinguished confreres up in Raleigh has actually increased my numbers.

Praise the Lord for disposable income and an understanding wife.

;-)

B

Well, I once decided that remove some 100 metal pikes from my Landsknechts (that nice sharp Northstar ones) and replace them with broom bristles. Needless to say that the unit drew "first blood" in that engagement.
In another, similar painful engagement, I took a hammer and flattened all spikes form a set of 40k buildings – just to make sure that nobody else got hurt.

Well I guess this really doesn't qualify as an accident, but back in the early 80's my wargaming buddies and I had all our stuff stored at one of the guy's house, and it being Detroit…of course the house got robbed. Our HO WW2, ACW and Napoleanics armies as well as terrain gone. Poof.

Fortunately they were mostly just Airfix plastics and the like, but still quite a financial hit for teenagers. But finding the Silver Lining, it did give us a chance to start over with better metal and resin figures and vehicles which we've been using ever since.

I had the wife back over a squad of 28mm Russians and a corgi German half track that I had just primed.

The Russians were turned into casualty markers, but the ole corgi was just fine.

I've done the old 'picked up the wrong rattle can by mistake' trick and primed a newly painted unit instead of varnishing it. The air was blue for a few minutes as well. I won't do that again.
I also bought two beautifully painted based and rigged 1/1200 Langton Anglo Dutch fleets off eBay from a guy in Poland, they were incredible, but he barely bothered to take any care in protecting them for postage, just a little bit of bubble wrap, and you know that dreadful sinking feeling you get when the parcel arrives and you can feel everything moving around inside and it sounds like you're shaking a load of loose gravel about? I managed to salvage about 2/3 of them, but the rest require hours and hours of major repair when I can bring myself to do it. It was awful to behold.

I had two issues. one major, one minor.

On moving to Dubai to work, my 15mm Napoleonics were travelling in cantilever tool boxes.

Marked 'Fragile'.

Obviously, they were tool boxes, so were thrown about by the movers as such.

It took 5 years to clear the repair backlog…

My last issue was more embarrassing (or 'Funny' according to the Mrs…)

I had a tray of initially primed Dutch Grenadiers on a tray, ready for a top coat of white.

I went out on to the balcony to spray them (CHEAT!), got my self ready, then sneezed in a very Disney-eque way!

The Dutch went up in the air, and quite a few went over the balcony, falling 3 floors into the low level (but sharp leaved) bushes that made up the 'garden'.

The kids were pretty good in recovering deserters…

Hi DT,
I wonder if marking the boxes "Fragile" only incited the movers.

;-)

B

13. Finally allowed to play in the Napoleonic club with the older guys. Painted the Baden Hussars in 25mm as my first unit…took forever…very tricky. Finished basing them and got a ride to the game store to show everyone. Three words…January…Wisconsin…Icy…

Feet went out from under me. Hussars went flying slo-mo in the air and smashed all over the street. Went home and cried.