Thank the Lord, the final working week for me in 2020 is over! This meant lot of work, stress and little progress with the ongoing hobby projects, but let’s see what did I manage to do.
A big relief is that I could finish both the Hungarian Royal Police rifle platoon and the post about it. I only need to make a summary post to close this project down for a while.
I almost finished all the Schürzen for my Panzer IVs and started to work on the first primed hull. Three more hulls are waiting for priming at the moment.
The 1848/49 side project: I could only make a baby step with the Austrian line infantry, started painting the first 18 minis and now two colours are on them (out of the more than half dozen).
I finished building the basic structure of the river sections and the ruined wall’s base with the paste. The water surface got its first layer of PVA in case of the river, next step is painting the water. I have already put the earth texture on the ruined base and some accessories (barrel, rods and rocks as construction material and a spare wheel) to represent urban ruins. After taking photos I will prime to whole base.
Well that is all for this week, not much, but I’m happy that I could still have progress. The following days progress depends on the government’s decision whether and when we are allowed to visit our parents for Christmas. I will try to use the spare time far from my table to continue the work with the pending posts and look for sources for next year’s projects.
As I have no picture for this week I would like to share an interesting story I have read, about a sunken ship and her cargo:
In 1533 the Portuguese ship Bom Jesus, on the way to India sunk in Africa. In the wreck, besides many other things, several tons of copper was found. The 1800 copper ingots were marked by the trading house of Fugger-Thurzó of Augsburg. The chemical analysis showed that the copper was mined in the Hungarian Kingdom, in mines around Besztercebánya (today it is in Slovakia and called Banská Bystrica)
You might ask why this discovery is important? First, it is interesting that the copper and other metals have a unique chemical signature which remains more or less constant while working with them and if you have a global database (there is one in a German facility) you can identify the mining place of the found pieces, even back to the 16th century. It is not a really well-konwn knowledge and field of science, even among the Hungarian historians too. Secondly, it shows that the Hungarian Kingdom was not just sitting back and watching the discovery of the New World and the colonization, but through trading houses joined the international trade and that the high-quality raw material from the Kingdom was a wanted product even in the colonies. And thirdly, for many years (and now leave back the politics) the history of the territories of the late Hungarian Kingdom sometimes were denoted as purely Romanian or Slovakian history (which is, partly and from a certain point of view) and the Hungarian thread was many times forgotten. Luckily in recent years historians both in Hungary and the neighbouring countries have an awakening professional pride and they write and talk about history as it was, and not as some other groups would like to see it.
See you next week!
Minis with moustaches 