Keep Your Powder Dry!

December 2020

I live in a very damp part of the world.

Very damp. The cold December rain is bucketing down even as I write.

Having been in the South-West of England for the last twelve years now, I'm pretty much used to it, but it still blind-sides me sometimes, and now it's threatening to take down my toy soldiers with it... for the dreaded mould has attacked the MDF in my Gallic-Celtic and WW2 German storage boxes.

[It's yet another 2020 thing of course: because I've not been playing regularly, I haven't been able to spot the damage and so act on it!]

The trouble really is my hobby space - or lack thereof. I'm lucky enough to live in a very pretty neck of the woods (my commute is like driving through Narnia), but our cottage is old. And it's small. And there isn't anywhere inside for me to keep my toys or have any hobbying space, so I have to keep everything other than current painting projects outside in my draughty, tumbledown shed.

I even added silica gel at the start of the summer. Was it useless? - or would it have been worse still without it?

Bleurgh! Luckily, their was no real damage to the minis themselves, beyond the bases.

I take precautions too: having lost card-based scenery and storage boxes to the ravages of ravenous snails in the past(!) I now wrap my treasured cardboard army cases in plastic refuse sacks, and that works absolutely fine. I also keep all of my projects and the plastic mountains in a combination of mid-sized stacking plastic storage boxes and 4L Really Useful Boxes. But even though I knew these weren't airtight, I still didn't anticipate thais level of carnage. My suspicions are that a combination of Covid-enforced neglect and the conductive cold of the magnetic sheets must've accelerated the damage.

There's another one just like this. Boooo.

It got my Gallic-Celtic cavalry too.

So what can I do about it?

Well, I've cleaned it all from the MDF of the models' bases (whilst wearing my mask), put them into freshly cleaned and dried boxes, and in the case of the Gallic-Celts, I've removed the magnetised movement trays, pending a final decision on their fate. I've then put everything into our airing cupboard to get as dry as possible, but Mrs King will get bored of that arrangement fairly soon, methinks. The next step is to store my toys somewhere better, to which end I've negotiated a far warmer, dryer space up in the attic. Only the mice to contend with there, then. Oh, and the awkwardness of accessing them. Finally, some new sort of storage will be winging my way, and for that I have a plan, so please wish me luck and watch this space...

...and keep your powder dry.