Greasy Fingers

In 2014 I wrote about wargamers who think their matt varnished figures acquire a shine because the varnish has worn off during play.  In the article “The Unvarnished Truth” I was at pains to point out that this was far more likely to be due to the deposition of sebum adding a nice glossy layer to the figures.

Earlier this week I came across an article from the British Library discussing their policy on using gloves to handle their more precious items.  It provided the following which may be of interest:

“A widely referenced paper, in the conservation field, and several forensic references, refer to fingerprint deposits consisting of 'over 98% water'. Recent analytical and theoretical studies of latent fingerprints, demonstrate that this figure is substantially in error. The deposit from a single human finger touch, whilst varying widely between individuals, is likely to contain less than 20% water and on average be about four micrograms of a mixture of amino acids, salts, primarily sodium and potassium chloride, fatty acids, squalene and many other trace compounds.”

Rules War :: Compilation Released (*)

This booklet collects a series of my blog posts together with an extract of an article I wrote for Miniature Wargames.  They share a theme: the popularity of rules for 15 mm wargames in the ancient, medieval & renaissance periods amongst competition wargamers.

Adventures In Cilician Armenia

A few years ago I wrote an article for Slingshot and thought I'd repost it here as a pdf file download with some minor changes to improve the grammar.

The article describes how I went about building a new allied contingent to get more out of my 15mm DBM Mongol Conquest army. This was meant to be a simple addition to an existing set of figures rather than sorting out a new army. As you might expect things did not work out that way.