Retail therapy - my alternative to Salute pt 1

I've been mulling over whether to go to Salute or not and have decided not to.  There's a few reasons but principally there's nothing that I want to buy that I can only get  from there.  The Covid situation appears to be ramping up a bit again so I'm not that comfortable going.  However, I'll be using the money I put aside with an extra £30 that the admission and travel would have cost to get some hobby supplies in for Autumn and Winter.

In fact I've already started.  I've just returned from a week away.  Whenever I go away I always look to see if there's a real bricks and mortar hobby shop to visit.  And this time I was lucky enough to go to Salisbury, which in itself is a great place, but in town there's the Salisbury Model Centre. 

This really is a proper hobby shop not a model railway shop with some extras, albeit there is a decent range for the railway modeller.  There's a great selection of model kits of all scales and interests and a small selection of wargames figures from the plastic Warlord, Victrix and Perrys ranges.

However, what makes a real shop so much better than online is all the extras that you get to see that you don't know or forget about.  And SMC is great in this regard.  They carry a number of paint ranges, tools, brushes etc. lots of scenic items from companies like Woodland Scenic and a lot of model railway buildings.  And there's all those bits and pieces like plastic card and metal rod etc.  I didn't go too mad but picked up some useful supplies.  

Prices were the same as buying from the Web and if you visit the SMC website you can get a 10% off voucher.  The proprietor was friendly and knowledgeable and I'm sure if I lived locally I'd be in there regularly.  He's a modeller himself and very enthusiastic.  I heartily recommend paying a visit if you get a chance. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City ruins scatter terrain

Image
2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection.  My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more. The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight.  I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregul
Read more

28mm Victrix Late-Roman Archers and Slingers

Image
When I first embarked on my Late-Roman project a year or so ago, I bought a few sample sprues from Gripping Beast, Wargames Atlantic and Victrix.  The Victrix one was from the Late Roman Archers and Slingers set.  The quality of these convinced me to choose Victrix for the project and I duly ordered up some sets.  After working my way slowly through these I finally went back to this original frame.  These are absolutely lovely models.  There's loads of variety and they go together beautifully.  The instruction sheet which I got from the Victrix website makes a massive difference in this regard.  I really enjoyed working on these.  They were quick to assemble and quick to paint up being in a uniform of sorts.   I only have the one frame, but I took a couple of the bodies from some of the Dark Age Archers that I was working on at the same time ( here ) and added some spare arms to make another pair of staff slingers.  This worked pretty well adding variety to the poses.  I'll do
Read more

More 28mm Victrix late-Romans

Image
As I assembled the forces for my first game using the late-Roman and Germanics that I've been working on for the last few months, I realised I needed a few more figures to make up the units.  I needed an extra pedes for each infantry unit and a leader for the missile troops.  I didn't have any more specific late-Romans left so I rooted through my other Victrix sprues. The bodies for the two spearmen came from a sprue I had from the Victrix Ancient Germans set.  Belt details aside, there's very little difference between the clothing across much of the ranges.  The hands holding the spear come from the Unarmoured Late-Romans set as do the heads.  I've got so many spare heads from that one pack I could outfit whole legions!  The shields are also from that set finished with Little Big Man transfers. I'm using Warlords of Erehwon to play with and each unit is usually a minimum of four strong with a leader figure.  I had four staff slingers and four archers but no leaders
Read more