Prussian Jägers

A blog or three ago, I spoke about converting my growing Prussian collection by combining the plastic sets from Perry Miniatures and HaT. 

http://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/wssblog/breaking-up-the-line/

To accompany the line infantry, I’ll be needing a few Prussian volunteer Jägers. However therein is a problem, the Perrys plastic ones all come in a single pose. The thought of a dozen identical Jägers advancing simply won’t do and there’s only so much you can do with head swaps. So how to make the line of skirmishers more interesting? 

There is the option of buying more Jägers, Perry don’t do any (yet) but Calpe and Westfalia both do some nice models. But that still leaves me with the ones I had. Hmm time for a little bit of a play…

These are the standard advancing pose but with more variation. The first has his rifle in a marching pose. The blue HaT model has joined the ranks as a volunteer Jäger with a simple head and arm swap. The third from the left has a bandaged head from a Warlord Hannoverian head, just for a bit of fun. The final one has borrowed his left arm from the Prussian command sprue. 

However skirmishers in my humble opinion need to be in firing and reloading poses - the first two are conversions using some spares from the very useful Victrix sets (Austrians in this case). The last two are spares from the Perry ACW set, the rifles have been cut down in length. A little bit of fiddling was required to make them fit, but they look good when finished. The left legs are cut and borrowed from Prussian infantry - they get the Jäger leg in return.

A few more examples , once with an experimental paint scheme. The one has ‘borrowed’ a Baker rifle from a Perry British Rifle sprue. 

Next is an attempt at some command figures. The bugle is from the Warlord Japanese set and the sabre is off an ACW cavalryman. The low slung rifle is from a Perry Dragoon, I’ve cut down the gloves into collars. So given the limited resources at hand and my admittedly meagre modelling skills, I’ve managed to make a few unique looking models with the resources I had at hand. Ok the buttons will need to be painted on some of the sleeves but that’s not the end of the world…

Finally a big THANK YOU to Martin Hogg for providing me with some spare Prussian heads. These will equip another brigade of HaT conversions for Ligny. Cheers mate!