Fire&Fury ACW using Epic miniatures for the Western battles (part 3) - The gunboats of Shiloh

Grant itself recognized the great help given by USS Tyler and USS Lexington during the battle of Shiloh namely by helping the repulse of the Confederates that tried to envelop the last positions of the Union left on the first day of the battle. That help continued during the night, this time not causing many casualties but preventing the enemy from sleep!

These two boats were converted commercial boats and fought all along the war in many battles and ended up with many scars. 

The construction of the miniatures was quite easy. I used two wooden toys as the base and built the upper parts from blue board. Small parts of card were added later as well as plastic chimneys and cardboard roofs. The masts were pieces of metal waiting for years to become useful. 

The gun ports had small pieces of plastic tubing to simulate the guns.

USS Tyler (sort of). 

USS Lexington. This one was troublesome as at first I could not see two chimneys and no covered deck and she was built, as you can see in the second picture of the post,  filled with mistakes. A few days later, thanks to information from ACW buffs, those mistakes were somehow corrected. 

At this time thousands of my faithful followers are asking "Why is this post Epic?" and Warlord is preparing its dozen layers to sue me. But cool down, the sailors are converted Epic plastic infantry, so I´m safe!

The weapons and bedrolls were carved out first, then kepis and slouch hats were trimmed and later squashed after heating with fire. A flag post was also converted to a ram. The result is far from good and I managed to find some great brands with 10mm and 15mm figures for this exact situation but all US based and taking too much time to arrive here. Besides the "Epic" flavour would be lost :)

Bird view of the USS Tyler. These models generally always end up in the fatty side as I want to compromise between the general shape, some details and a smaller size than scale. The same happened to the 20mm aircraft carrier I showed you a few weeks ago and many other structures made all along the years. 

Bird view of the USS Lexington. The painting of these boats is very scruffy due to the haste I have all the time and also to the hot glue used to put together all parts. This glue leaves plenty of bumps everywhere but its an easy way to attach different materials. The blue board was covered with PVA glue and then all joints got a small stream of superglue to strengthen the final result. Don´t forget to paste your blue board with PVA otherwise you will get a smaller scale thing in the end.  

A big Thank You to the FB ACW buffs that gave me precious information in particular to Richard Schwab and Mike Hinton this time and also Brad Butkovich for some of my future projects. 

Next: More Russians for Seelow Heights.