September 17 and September 24, 2023

Still nursing bruised ribs from my baseball-dream fall, so no activity yet on the Workbench.

September 10, 2023

Field of Dreams - aka, Message from the Injury Roster:

Friday morning at about 6 am, I had a dream about baseball. I hit a clean single and decided to stretch it into a double. As I neared 2nd base, I dove into a slide….. and hit the bedroom floor —- hard. My wife took me to Urgent Care; no head damage, except for a lump, but serious rib bruising accompanied by massive pain. I don’t even know whether I reached 2nd base “safe,” so all I’m left with is the agony of defeat.

Workbench saw no activity this week.

September 3, 2023

I didn’t do much in the way of figure painting this week.  For the past couple weeks I have been painting and rebasing literally hundreds of Wizards of the Coast Star Wars figures, but I kept putting off texturing their bases.  This week was largely devoted to resolving that problem.  I got most of the bases textured… a big relief.  For this I took a picture of a tiny representative sample.

Once most of the bases were done, I turned my attention to a wonderful swap meet find I bought on Saturday… the Zambesi Zelda.  This was released by Dole near the end of the Covid era and sold only at Disneyland (maybe Disneyworld) for only a few months.  I’ve been going to Disneyland since it opened in 1955 and have never understood why they didn’t produce a toy of the Jungle Cruise boat.  Now here it was sold as a Dole Whip bowl and as a very limited edition.  My first task in addressing the repurposing of the boat for use with 28mm figures was to raise the deck.  Fortunately the upper structure of the boat is hinged so it is easy to work on the interior.  I used Legos to shim the height of the deck and cut a cardstock pattern to check that I got the height I needed.  The cardstock will be the pattern I will use when cutting the actual deck out of Evergreen plastic v-groove.  The figure is a 28mm Artizan Design Thrilling Tales character used for scale.   Today I also ordered a boiler from Crooked Dice that looks like it will work well.