Friday, February 7, 2014

African Porters


So I'm back with some more figures for my African WWI gaming.  These are porters from Old Glory's Darkest Africa line.  I've discussed my unhappiness with them before in passing, but haven't given you a chance to see them up close.


 
You get four body types, and five head types, though I have only used four (the fifth was carrying elephant tusks, which don't really fit the part of a military baggage train). The heads do not fit well on the bodies, and you will need to add green stuff to the necks to keep them from looking ridiculously thin. The muscles also look lumpy, with quite a few of the arms at odd angles, with protruding elbows that make the figures look like they were sculpted wearing gauntlets. 

Here are some other angles to show you the strange arms and over-sized back muscles. 

The casting quality was also really bad, with strange lumps or holes in the figures.  For example, in the first photo, look at how all the cases have chunks missing from the lower corner.  There were also a lot of misaligned molds when the heads/baggage were cast, resulting in the need to do a lot of filing and filling.  You can see some of this misalignment in the second photo, on the crate carried by the porter on the left (this is even after all my work to minimize it).

The also set comes with a guide and two porters carrying a lion corpse, but I have not yet painted those.

Overall, I am not really happy with them and would not have made my purchase if I knew what I was getting.  However, with quite a bit of work I think they will look acceptable on the table, and I did get a lot of figures to create an impressively sized baggage train.



2 comments:

  1. Haha...I think strapping is an understatement. To me, they look like they have been modeled on synthol addicts:

    http://acidcow.com/pics/5770-victims-of-synthol-53-pics.html

    ReplyDelete