Conversions

My 15th century collection features numerous converted miniatures, as one of the most important and satisfying aspects of the hobby for me is making my units and individual miniatures look unique. On this page I'll share some the interesting conversions I've done with some hopefully useful photo examples.

The collection is mostly made up of Perry Miniatures, both plastics and metals from their Wars of the Roses and European Armies ranges. One of the joys of multi-part plastic miniatures is being able to mix components from different sets - with Perry Miniatures having a total of 5 plastic sets for these ranges, why would I not want to do this??? To limit myself to assembling the miniatures straight from the box with no part-swapping would be a wasted opportunity! Plastic also lends itself to being cut up and re-positioned, so things like leg-swaps can be attempted. The accompanying metal miniatures to go with the plastics are somewhat limited (at least compared to some of the other Perry ranges) but very useful.

I also have miniatures from some other companies mixed in - Foundry, Steel Fist, Crusader and Old Glory. Some of these fit in perfectly with Perry, whilst others benefit from some conversion work.

Sallet and bevor transplants

The most widespread helmet of the late 15th century was the sallet, often combined with a bevor for lower face and neck protection. There are a wide variety of them provided throughout the Perry plastic sets. Cunningly I have found out how more sallet/bevor combos can be made. The lower edges of most sallets are dead straight, so the heads can be easily (carefully) sliced in two at this point. The upper parts can then be mixed and matched with different lower parts, giving lots of new heads! Luckily the best head for donating its bevor is in both the mounted men-at-arms and foot knights sets, and for some reason I don't make much use of it, so I have lots of spare bevors on hand. This also lets me remove bevors from heads that previously had them. I also paired some 'kettle hats' with bevors.

Old Glory conversions

I wanted to see if I could mix some Old Glory sculpts into my units to add further variety, specifically in my pike units. The Old Glory 'Italian Wars' Swiss pikemen (which despite what their name might suggest seem better suited for the late 15th century, 1490s perhaps?) have potential. They are a bit odd, all in identical poses, and some of the armour details are a little suspect to me, but I am happy to mix some of them into my mostly Perry units. The problem is they are much smaller than the Perry range. I realised the torsos, arms and heads are fine - they just have really short legs! So I manage to do some leg transplants, giving them new longer legs to make them scale better with the Perry range. I searched the Perry plastics sets for legs in the right sort of pose that would work, and found only a couple, but they worked very well. I also took some legs from a spare Swiss pikman by Wargames Foundry. The original legs are easily snipped off the Old Glory pikemen, though its a bit cleaner on some sculpts than others. Getting a smooth join with the new legs requires a bit of green stuff to fill the gaps, and I found adding new swords and bucklers hanging from their belts usefully covers particularly messy areas. As a lot of these conversions end up in the middle of large pike units, it could be argued the joins won't ever really be seen and I can cut some corners here!

I also tried the same with the 'Flemish pikemen' set from Old Glory's Wars of the Roses range. This is another odd set, with the same stubby legs. I found two or three who took some new plastic legs quite well. I do wish you could buy Old Glory figures in smaller quantities, rather than having to get them in packs of 30!!!!

Sculpting new clothing layers

I had some clever ideas for conversions involving some quite extensive sculpting with 'green stuff', which is beyond my ability - I'm hopeless at doing anything with the stuff other than filling gaps. I made the decision to commission some conversions, from Graham Green, who you can find on facebook as 'Greygreen Customs'. His fee for a single 28mm conversion is quite reasonable, and he was able to do what I wanted perfectly.

The idea was to get more variety mixed into my large pike units - I realised some of the Perry metal sculpts wearing just doublets could have new layers of clothing sculpted over the top. Graham was able to sculpt new padded jacks / gambesons for them, and it worked really well. I've also got some with livery jackets over either gambesons or mail. The pictures below should show how it works!

Another thing I got Graham to sculpt for me was some new footwear for some Perry plastics - tall riding boots to represent dismounted 'mounted' soldiers. A few of them also got some new mail shirts underneath their jackets or brigandines, as the pictures below demonstrate.

Archer conversions

There is a small but quite nice Wars of the Roses range from Crusader Miniatures - in particular it's got a nice selection of archers. They scale well with Perry Miniatures, but a little work can be done to make them blend in even better.

This is achieved with hand swaps - the small hands and short, bendy bows are the weakest parts of the Crusader sculpts but they can easily be replaced with Perry plastics. I opted for the bows from the Agincourt range, as I think they have much better proportions. I was originally planning to just replace the left hands holding the bows, but realised the right hands can be replaced too if combined with a headswap (the right hands and heads are often touching, so removing one and not the other could be a little tricky). The original right hands on the Crusader archers were not quite right, looking like closed fists rather than a two-finger arrow grip, so were definitely worth getting right!

I also found a few quite nice archer sculpts from Grenadier Miniatures, who were improved by new hands in the same way.