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Didn't manage to get much done last night. One of my son's friends brought over an airbrush that wasn't working to see if I could fix it. This was a Master Airbrush G22, which I believe is from China, a cheap and dirty knock off of an Iwata airbrush. She useses it on cakes so I'm not actually sure what they shoot through it, I'm guessing food coloring of some kind. She just warned me not to use paint in it. I spend an hour taking it apart only to discover that it actually can't be fixed. Someone had managed to squeeze down to hard on a piece that the needle goes through that only air could get through it. So that was an hour wasted. Afterwards I found out that its like a $30 airbrush. The difference between this one and an Iwata is pretty minor but the flaw is that a piece that is removable in the Iwata is actually part of the body of the G22 and can't be replaced like it can in my Iwata. I think it wouldn't be a bad airbrush to use it just takes a little TLC during cleaning to make sure that the o-ring up front doesn't deform. The Iwata doesn't need this o-ring.

Anyway that followed with some work on Perry Miniature Normans, but I only managed to get another two boxes (12 miniatures) cleaned up last night. That would be one SAGA point of Archers, which are ineffective enough that I'm not sure I would even use them.

So my best tool on the workbench last night was my 12 year old bottle of Macallan Scotch that at least let me ignore the cuts and jabs on my fingers.

As if my regular hobbies aren't eccentric enough I have spent some time accumulating some of the Clue games that are missing from my collection. I was aware of two versions of Disney's Haunted Mansion edition of Clue. The 1st edition comes in a very cool tin box and the 2nd edition comes in a box although it uses the same dimensions and artwork as the tin box. I actually prefer this style of box, its just easier to store and doesn't "crush" as easily as the more standard long boxes. So, inevitably I somehow managed to bid and win two copies of the 2nd edition without realizing it till they arrived on my doorstep. Last night I spent sometime checking things out just to make sure everything was there when I had a bit of a surprise. The 1st edition was  just as advertised with the very cool plastic ghost miniatures as well as the pewter character miniatures. The first of the two 2nd editions was what I expected as well; cardboard ghost standups and plastic character miniatures. The second 2nd edition surprised me a bit. It had the cardboard ghost standups but came with pewter character miniatures. I checked out the Art of Murder website and apparently there are a couple like this floating around out there. I suspect that whatever company Disney used to make the games had left over pewter characters and used those up before they started dipping into the plastic characters. The 2nd edition box clearly shows plastic characters in the picture on the bottom of the box. So inadvertently I managed to acquire all three variations of this edition of Clue. Sometimes fortune just smiles on you.

If you are familiar with Clue (or Cluedo) then you know that the idea of the game is to figure out which character murdered Mr Body, which weapon they used and which room it happened in. Of course in the Disney version we can't have Disney characters responsible for murder so the premise changes a bit. Here you have to determine which character is being haunted by which Ghost (ghosts replace the weapons from the original game) and which room the haunting is taking  place in.

Earlier this year I finally had a chance to paint up a batch of Normans for SAGA. I've always wanted to paint up some Normans and a commission (which backfired in the end) let me paint them without adding them to my collection. Since I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and ordered a Norman Army made up from the Perry Miniatures 1st Crusade Line. Intending to pay for that from my commission proceeds I went ahead and ordered what I needed from Architects of War (Awesome service by the way). Fortunately they were out of stock of just about everything (at which point they just asked for my list and made sure that it was in addition to their re-stocking order) and by the time they arrived I had the money saved up that I needed. So tonight I was able to sit down in my new workroom and start the tedious chore of getting them ready to paint. I really hate this stage of the process. I'm about a third of the way through them after tonight and I think I miss ordered some of the cavalry, it should still work out in the end though and I should be able to make up a couple of cool command stands as well. Since its a relatively small army I have decided to paint it up for the army painting competition in February at Genghis Con XXXIV. So this one is going to move along even slower than I normally go. I'll intersperse some other miniatures just to keep from getting to discouraged with them. Here are the results from tonight's work: