I have been painting in the garden today for the first time in many years. In the past, painting outdoors kept me safe from being cooped up inside in a room amidst the heady fumes of Airfix enamels and glue.
As an experiment, some of the more useless poses (lying down etc.) in the Airfix WW1 American troops have been adapted to become Scouts for my Wide Games Project.
One possible source of Scout figures for Wide Games are the Airfix WW1 Americans with their doughboy / lemon squeezer hats. Their puttees look a little like long Scout socks and their tunics like Scout blouses.
When I was a boy, WW1 Airfix figures were no longer in the shops by the late 1970s and so were very hard to get hold of. I made do with what precious few WW1 figures came down through the family.
They have since been rereleased in the 2000s by Hat and more recently by Airfix themselves in their Vintage Classics range.
http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=498
https://www.airfix.com/uk-en/shop/figures/airfix-vintage-wwi-us-infantry.html
The old ones are in green, the Hat ones I think are the ones in Sandy brown.
The idea of hacking up precious WW1 Americans to make Scout figures still seems a little odd, so I have used the more ‘non combatant’ poses.
These include the famous skipping doughboys with their picnic hamper, the doughboy sat on a box, the usually useless dying casualty and the lying down but not firing figures.
The figures still need painting in suitable Scout uniform colours, with painted details added of scarves, shorts and long socks.
Clipping rifles off and replacing these with wire patrol staffs or staves should help demilitarise these figures.
Hot glue gunning to a base makes the more useless lying down poses stand in a more useful manner.
Smaller scale Scouts?
For my Wide Games Project, suitably wide terrain, suitable ground scale and size of figures are an obvious issue. Going smaller means that my hex board becomes a bigger territory. However there are not many old fashioned Scout Hat type figures.
The advantage of these HO / OO or 1:76 WW1 figures is that they should link with HO or OO type railway figures and buildings.
http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/ShowFeature.aspx?id=107
Scouts and trek carts are available in railway figures but they are usually few in number and expensive or in more modern Scout gear. Preiser also do a set of very European or Germanic looking Scouts.
The Dapol (former Airfix) passengers and railway staff / navvies etc should provide some inexpensive suitable country characters.
https://www.dapol.co.uk/shop/model-accessories/self-assembly-oo-kits
Lots of possibilities for a larger scale Wide Games using OO railway size buildings and scenery that I already have (sounds like material for my Sidetracked blog https://sidetracked2017blog.wordpress.com
Blog posted by Mark Man of TIN, 1970s Cub Scout (Bronze Arrow, Retired) on 22 June 2019
Pound Store Plastic Warriors 