Finished - Potpourri

Since very much awesomely fixing the hatchet handle I actually HAVE done some painting. I finished a couple of Black Plague heroes, about half of the Black Ops heroes and an experimental mini that has been sitting half-finished for ages. 

Initially, I got to work on Lady Grimm and Glynda Battlestout with the same 10/0 detail that I approach most minis with. Frustrated at my chunky paints and fraying brushes I reached for new ones of each. While doing so, a corrupted version of an old axiom "don't let the great be the enemy of the finished." I knew it wasn't right but with the years of backlog I have, I can't take a week to paint a single mini. Let's get some colors down, a little detail on the faces and let's get them done. 

I finally have two of the very many Zombicide boxes finished in their entirety and that has me jazzed to finish some other boxes like special guests and Heroes boxes completely. To do that, we gotta get paint on minis. I am far from batch painting but I've stopped doing three stare highlighting and going blind with fine detail brushes. Part of me regrets this because I know I can do better but... but let's get things finished while we have spare time. 

OTT - Close Combat Weapon

Doing a little woodworking on an old busted hatchet. Mostly I am working off of this video. My hatchet handle has an archaic teardrop shaped opening and my hardware store only has round short handles. So I am going to shoehorn a longer ax handle into the opening then cut it shorter. Or maybe I'll leave it long and have an ax that looks like zippy the pinhead. Who knows.

I used a saw blade on the dremel to rough shape the larger teardrop into a smaller teardrop hopefully without ruining the taper. I already need some sanding discs to do the more gentle shaping of the handle so I am at a stop. 

This is an ancient craft of joining wood to metal and it is an honor to learn it. I really hope that I don't mess it up. 

EDIT: And here is the finished product. I intentionally left the extra material at the top to give it that ancient look and also because I don't have a saw that can cut it flush (yet). I ended up having to scrap my plans to use a cut down ax handle because it took too much work to sand down. This was much easier and I agree with the tikki torch-owner in the video, it looks better. 

It was really a sinch with a pre-shaped handle. A little sanding and it slid down pretty easily. I put some nice dents in the deck pounding it in but that is my bad. I should have known better. After that, it was wedge and glue, bang bang. Two metal spikes, bang bang. And my baby shot me down. 

I sharpened the edge too with a sharpening disc so now this thing is lethal to fauna as well as flora. I really want to throw it at something but the partner forbids it. 

It was fun and grubby turning my hobby skills to something like this. I also had to replace a shovel handle but after seeing how much work it was and that the price difference was almost nothing, I just bought a nice shovel.