Great Boers

I finally received my packet of Jacklex samples this week and set about painting a few up. The first thing I noticed was that, as Matt had warned me, they had quite a lot of flash metal and it took about 45 minutes just to de-flash them and file the bases. However that said they are surprisingly charming little figures although sadly they suffer from the same problem as the Newline range – they’re not to a constant scale. The marching highlander for instance is a good few millimetres taller than his advancing friend.

Jacklex BW4 Boer running with separate rifle - simple but charming

This is a shame as I could have been tempted and I particularly like the running figures with separate rifles. It’s a bit fiddly gluing the rifles to the hands of the figures but it’s well worth the effort, the regular British infantryman is the best of these. So far I have only painted one Boer but I will post the rest here in due course.

Newline Designs BOE02 - Boer cavalry

I’m glad I got these samples but in the end in it just reinforced my original decision to use the Newline Designs colonial range for this project. This decision was also helped along by the recent release of Highlanders by Newline (see my last post). The one remaining problem is artillery as I can’t find anybody who makes 20mm Boer artillery and of course I must have a pom-pom! Jacklex do a decent range of British artillery including a very grand looking 4.7” naval gun and a deadly maxim gun. I may possibly be able to convert or scratch-build some Boer guns, I’ll have to see.