Casting Report: French Artillery Part 3 of 3 : Prince August Mould Set No.80-08 - The Gribeauval Gun

OK, first of all : Happy New Year!

I think we all have the same hopes for this year: that the virus crisis will end soon. But I believe 2021 will be again a long year.

But we wargamers or minature enthusiast have an advantage over (some) other people : we have always something to do, it never gets boring. So 'lockdowns' are not a problem when it comes to the question 'What shall I do with my time at home?'

For me, the next months will see an increased effort to finally bring my 25mm napoleonics to the table. But first I have to finish the 54mm napoleonic artillery during the next days. The last mould set is the gun itself.

 

 
The whole set was pretty easy to use.  And the wheel was a surprise. Normally moulds for wheels make big problems but here the first wheels were done in some minutes. After a closer look I found that this mould already had some air holes for the spokes. That helped a lot. Some inevitable failures later I drilled additional holes to speed things up.

The next day came the other surprise : there was only one wheel left to be casted and I had to figth to make it. I used a sligthly different metal with more tin in it (from some old spoons) and had one failure after the other. I needed about 6 tries to finally get the last wheel done. The realization is: the material is everything.

The amunition box needs a little hole near to the entry so that the lower part of the box don't has a gap. Seems that there is always an air bubble at this place.

I really have a problem with the tiny extra parts. The are a bit difficult to cast and you need them four times for every cannon. Means you have to use a part of the mould more often than it should be. This does not only shorten the lifetime of the mould a bit, you need much more time to make all the parts.

OK, sure, you can produce more guns with this mould set than you (and some other users) would ever need, nonetheless this detail should could have been designed better. If you look at the pictures above you will see there was enough space in all moulds for these parts.

This is the assembly instruction included with the moulds:

 

And here one of the guns ready to be painted. A realy nice and detailed model.