Crossbowmen For Bogavania Made From Modern Infantrymen

Having missed out on some new crossbowmen figures recently I decided to convert some. The figures I used, of all things, were modern infantrymen, 50 and 54mm. Now that might sound pretty weird, right? Well, since when has that deterred me? I have made many very different types of warriors from modern infantry.

  What made me think of it was some of the Fritz helmets continued a little too far down the necks and reminds me of some medieval helmets. I trimmed off the goggles. Others were too small, so I built Green Stuff furs around them. Furs hats are common Bogavanian items. One figure I replaced the head with a spare home cast Morion helmeted metal head I had in my spares box.

 Below you see the figures which are only less than half a unit, but I'll be making more eventually.

I wanted blue tunics with brown leather and metal studs. The red pants are not part of Bogavanian colors, but I wanted them to look even more unique. The bases are meant to look like stone work and suit as crossbowmen often are best to defend static positions.

  Some have sword scabbards which I trimmed down from plastic comb blades. The crossbows I made by trimming down the firearms and drilling a hole for pieces of bent copper wire. A clump of Green Stuff was placed at the end to represent the metal bit for placing the foot when reloading.

                                                     Some had tunics extended with putty.

 This figure's assault rifle was too skinny to drill a hole for the bow so I drilled a hole into the middle and added straight wire and putty with the bow glued on top. It's pretty rough, I know, but I wanted new crossbows in a hurry, as Mat chose to have more than one unit in his capital defence and I wanted to reduce those in stand-in Beersteiner livery.

                                                    Here is one in Spanish style helmet.

  I removed much of the modern equipment but these figures had a semi hard plastic and it was more difficult to cut through than, for example, AIP figures. I left them and painted them as brown leather containers for extra ammo, food or whatever. Admittedly they don't look very medieval/Renaissance but this is fantasy so they don't have to be 100% historical.

  Although the plastic is a bit hard it is also brittle. When I tried to remove this figure from its card base and reposition it the leg broke, so I Super Glued it and added some stones underneath it for extra strength.

So there you go! These are probably among the most unique crossbow figures ever made. One thing I have never seen is a running crossbow man figure, but I am guessing there would be occasions when they would run to a new position.

  These figures will see their first battle tomorrow. Other options for figures would be to make them from BMC ACW figures.