Light feet and Short Spears

Another twelve figures for the Oda clan.  This time it's a dozen Ashigaru with short Yari.  These are the soft metal spears that come with the Perry models, and overall I am less than enthused.  As you can see from the pictures, it is difficult to keep them from bending even with light handling.  This is fine for unit basing, but annoying in skirmish models.  Normally I just use the pikes that come with the Wargame' Factory (now Warlord) plastic Ashigaru, but those are running out. 

The decals for the Oda Mon are from Warflag.  These are a little more difficult to work with than the Perry decals as all of the decals are part of a single sheet rather than individual decals.  That means a lot of trimming to make sure they lay flat.  The worked well for the Sashimono, but I had a lot of frustration with with the mon for the helmets, and gave up on using them for the breastplates.  Even with a tight trim and decal set, it was hard to get them to adhere to the curved surfaces.  The decals are transparent which means you need to apply them over white paint.  Next time I am going to try putting a layer of varnish between the paint and the decal to see if it helps. 

Not everything is negative, the sculpts themselves are still well detailed and rather painless to give paint. I have another 12, with long pike waiting for basing and then I need to tackle more Samurai.

I also took the opportunity to playtest my Samurai against the Koreans in To the Strongest! over the weekend.  Thoughts and photos need to be aggregated, but overall not too bad.