"This Morning I Photographed My Lead Mountain..." Topic

Was doing a bit of organizing this morning and I took some photos of my lead mountain, just to see at a glance how much there was to do…

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This is probably a good idea, something I should do myself before things get too scattered.
No more buying new stuff until everything I already have gets painted! I keep telling myself…

Hmph? My first thought was "two months. Maybe four if he's not retired and allowing for the repair box." (I've got stuff which has been in the repair queue for YEARS while I wait for a suitable arm to come along.)

But your self-diagnosis sounds right: too many scales, and you need to consolidate forces for bigger games. That turns out to be a lot easier in F&SF than in history of course.

Oh. I notice that none of the boxes seemed to have lids underneath. Strongly recommend you get boxes with snap-on lids forthwith. Open boxes of troops draw cats, small children and those inevitable moments when you place you hand on the end of the box which isn't resting on anything and turn the box into a trebuchet.

Gotta go. Picked up 15 boxes "needing work" from a friend on the 20th. Still five to go.

Good luck!

I wouldn't dare put the mountain all in one spot – it would collapse the floor….

I need a guide dog and one great Sherpa to get to the top of my lead mountain…I may even find lost gamers amongst the peaks and valleys of my Matterhorn of unpainted lead!

Trick is boxing and labels to find any unit in a timely fashion

I don't know, that is more of a hill than a mountain.

Mountain ?? Ah have a shed full ! <sigh>

At least you don't seem to be overwhelmed by your lead mountain! Many years ago, I built a spreadsheet and took inventory of everything I had purchased but not painted and was totally depressed for a month or so.

Grelber

Many thanks all – lots of LOL in the replies!

Hmph? My first thought was "two months. Maybe four if he's not retired and allowing for the repair box."

Ha! Yes, very much not retired. So by the New Year seems plausible, thankfully.

Oh. I notice that none of the boxes seemed to have lids underneath. Strongly recommend you get boxes with snap-on lids forthwith. Open boxes of troops draw cats, small children and those inevitable moments when you place you hand on the end of the box which isn't resting on anything and turn the box into a trebuchet.

You are quite right – I have been very slack! Did this this morning.

At least you don't seem to be overwhelmed by your lead mountain! Many years ago, I built a spreadsheet and took inventory of everything I had purchased but not painted and was totally depressed for a month or so.

No, definitely not depressed about it, not big enough of an issue and there are usually options. But there is definitely something to be said for dealing with stuff at the 'issue' stage, before it becomes an actual 'problem'. What I like is having a day to a week's worth i.e. if I took a week off work, then I could paint up everything in the pile. That feels like the right amount of stuff to have in the painting box. I think what that looks like would be something like:

a 6mm army
a 28mm box set
5-10 individual 28mm figures
a 15mm platoon
one 28mm or a couple of 20mm or 15mm vehicle or aircraft kits.
a terrain piece

Some wise TMPer once wrote that broadly speaking, money was the best proxy for painting time i.e. $20 USD of stuff usually took the same amount of time to paint, whatever that consisted of. So I guess the list above would be what – maybe £100.00 GBP-120 or so? (c.$120-160?)

I only wish I had that little….

Rookie.

That looks like what was my mountain -- 40 years ago.

It has since morphed into a continent-spanning range of immense heighth and breadth.

I am in the slow process of finally making a count of all my painted minis, and may follow that with a count of unpainted but primed/asembled minis, and then separate lists for vehicles and buildings and misc. terrain bits and props and ornaments. I needed more tedium in my life. But I figured it would be a good thing to know somewhat exactly how much of this stuff is around, for insurance purposes, or for eventual sale/disposal. The problem for the bulk of my unpainted stuff is that it's so hard to count dozens of tubs of raw figures, figures still in boxes, baggies, or blister packs, just piles of lead. The others are at least easily visible in their storage bins and drawers, even if it is a very slow slog to count them up a section at a time.

When I get the census done, I will report the totals here and see how it compares. I really have no idea offhand other than "thousands" (I mean, I already know I have around 300 Heroclix, half repaints, and that's just minor league fluff compared to the real armies, when I know I can field at least 600 figures for the Zulu War and have over a thousand painted Jacobite rebellion minis already), which is why I finally want to get something accomplished.

For me, the crisis was almost 9 years ago when I retired and for the first time in at least a decade, everything was under one roof and (more or less) sorted out. It took me 5-7 years to get rid of enough stuff to make things more or less manageable, and I try not to dwell on the time and money spent on projects which never got to the table, or fought about three games.

Then I started getting roped in by friends. Guys, do everyone a favor and find good homes for your surplus troops before your widow or your children toss them in a dumpster. Tell them how to dispose of the ones you keep.

Thanks Robert. One reason for me doing this now is to avoid these kinds of issues later on.

If you call that a mountain I will have to refer to mine as Olympus Mons from now on…

To me that isn't a Lead Mountain, its a Lead Molehill!