Dipping my toes into Napoleonics

Reading into Napoleonics I’ve learned that ‘cannon’ as a plural is a thing and that using it makes you just better than the others, har har har <sips tea with pinky in the air>. So, there is the joke in the title. With that out of the way, I would like to cycle back to a handy comment all the way back to my first entry in this project.

Back then I still optimistically replied that I wanted to try to build the 3D paper ones, where you have to fold the cut out gun barrel around a pin. The longer I thought on it, the more I came to the realisation that using a actual tiny cannon model might indeed be preferable.

Rather than riding out this wave of reason, I jumped on top of the shark and tried surfing onto the wave of 3D printing. Oh, not the still somewhat reasonable wave of resin printing. Oh noooo <waves hand and spills tea from cup>. The wave of FDM printing with a 0.2 nozzle.

So, I sat down, and looked up a chunky design on Thingiverse of which I felt that it could handle the scaling down to 10mm wargaming.

The scaling down went okay…? The spokes of the wheels disappeared at this size, so I made some new wheels myself in TinkerCad. Also, I had to fill up the cannon barrel to avoid a hole appearing in it. Lo and behold!

To assemble it, I slightly widened the holes in the wheels, so they connected snugly to the gun carriage. I also found that the rounded bottom side of the gun carriage came out a bit ugly, so I straightened that out in TinkerCad as well. This gave me a design that I felt could be repeated!

Limbers

Looking at the paper cut out model of the canon I noticed that Peter also supplied you with limbers. Now, I didn’t immediately find any (free) limbers designs that either scaled down well or matched my cannon, so I thought: maybe I can design one myself! I have to apologise to any specialists in the field. I just looked at these two pictures I found with DuckDuckGo and let myself get inspired to create something.

As you can see I just reused the wheels I’d created earlier. Once printed out, I found myself with the smallest lawn mower, which just happens to be perfect for mowing flock!

Together with the cannons, I found it worked well. The cannon (!) and the limbers did not fit very well on the base size suggested in Napoleonic Wargaming by Neil Thomas, which is 40mm x 40mm. I wasn’t going to give up my limbers though and just decided to increase the base size to 30mm x 60mm.

I’m quite happy with the end result and decided to bring my two bases of cannon out into the sun for a photoshoot. Coming soon to theaters near you: Honey, I shrunk the artillery devision!