P is for Puckator Pirates in Plaster, Phoohaarrr!

Text to follow; needs to be up before midnight on International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Due to the vagaries of Vodafone, that nearly didn't happen!

Oh Yes!...23.59 hrs. Text after I've made a coffee... 

You will not believe what a performance that was. I remembered it was coming-up to TLAP day (I'm not writing that out a dozen times!) a few weeks ago, in fact I thought I might have missed it as I did last year, then I noticed people were visiting the previous Pirate posts in unusual numbers a few days ago, obviously Googling TLAPD, and getting a return from here.

Made a mental note to get into the attic and see if there was something Pirate-like I could shoot a few pictures of and post today...so far so good. Then totally forgot about it this morning, until I saw M-7's Post this afternoon (nice vinyls), and thought "Oh Bugger!", went over to Facebook (I know - my soul's lost to the legions of the damned!) and reminded everyone there, then spent the rest of the day not going in the attic, thinking "I'll do it this evening", well this evening came round and I couldn't be arsed!

More than not being arsed, I'd realised that I had some stuff on Picasa, I just A) wasn't sure if I'd already posted it, and B) couldn't find it? Searched for pirates [on my own blog!] didn't seem to have posted it (doesn't mean you haven't already thought; "Hold on, two of those look familiar?", though!), then had one of those demi-deja-vous moments when it seemed I'd already thought I'd posted it and looked for it once before....about last autumn - TLAPD.

Box Art

Well, I then found a couple of images I'd taken of the second tranche of these (more below) a couple of months ago, but couldn't find the rest - which I thought I'd taken last autumn, when I must have gone through the rigmarole I'd just been through again?

Eventually I found the older pictures, buried at the bottom of the Picasa file list in all the old, weird and 'hidden' files and other folders Picasa seems to create when your back's turned - I'm such a Luddite! Only to be reminded that I had gone through the whole thing a year ago, and had realised that I'd actually taken the pictures in Brightwalton, about the last thing I photographed there and that only two figures were shot and I intended to shoot the rest when I got the second tranche, which had been mentioned when I saw the purveyor. So I didn't just forget TLAPD last year, it was a fail! Although, also, I WAS elsewhere, doing other things.

So, then cobbled together a third photo from the two new images, decided they were a bit dark, went back and brightened them both, did another collage, and started to upload them with an hour to go, when my dongle started to play-up, much faffing around and five failed up-loads later it was ten-to-midnight on TLAPD with a still-blank sheet of cyber-paper! The rest is centred above!

I now have the coffee, and we'll look at Discover Pirates from Puckator...

  First - Dig-out your Pirate...and bits!

A brilliant idea, poorly executed...we've all seen these dig-for-shite toy/hobby things in stores and/or museum gift-shops I'm sure, and it works very well for resin copies of fossilized sea-shells, post-modern designer-style lumpen chess-pieces, or soft vinyl dinosaurs or aliens, or even polyethylene bits of Egyptological artifact or painted glass marbles with Disney characters on them...but it doesn't work for delicate thin strands of PU resin Pirate!

As a result what you get is several pieces of Pirate! And nowhere in the instructions (a lot of small print on the box) do you get anything, in any language equating to The sword is separate and looks like a twig when it's covered in plaster. So unless you are very careful indeed, you end up with several pieces of unarmed (and un-arm'ed) pirate!

 More bits!

So to get the second one I actually ran the block of plaster under a tap and washed it away slowly, using a soft toothbrush, I still nearly lost the sword and broke an arm...it may even have broken as the plaster set, because I was very careful.

Just to show how easy it is to discard the sword even if you do spot it in the pile of plaster, there are also actual pieces of stick in the plaster!

 Still in pieces...

The reason I only originally did the two was that I wanted to keep some 'mint' and didn't want to wreak them all getting them out, fearing I was a bit of a butter-fingers, I'm not, I just couldn't believe something this incapable of success could be aimed at children!

Then I ran into the purveyor (Peter Evans, thank you Peter) at the Plastic Warrior show two years ago and he said he had some more and would I like them, I said yes, which is why I passed  on posting them last year after going round the houses - "did I post them already, where's the photo's, oh, on the BW dongle", transfer them to the lap-top, loose them in Picasa etc...etc...

 Shed Storage

So I then picked them up at PW this year, sorted what I thought was a complete set of the four I still needed loose examples of. They had in the interim (Peter won't mind me saying...I hope?) got a little the worse for wear, woodlice and slugs had 'had-at' the boxes, so not all of them had their little red ID stickers. I took them back to college with all the tools I thought I'd need to forensically extricate them with the minimum of damage...and set to work...carefully.

I ended-up with a pile of bits, a pile of bits that equated to 2-and-a-half of the figures I needed and an imploded duplicate. So home the following weekend, got all the unmarked or mixed-up box/contents ones and took them all back to college for another session. I think the last one I tried was the missing figure! I say I think, it wasn't that long ago, but it's been such a performance I'm blanking the whole thing from my mind like some nasty childhood experience...probably another reason why I such trouble locating everything this afternoon!

Because I hadn't photographed them after the first attempt and forgot to photograph them after the second, we are still in need of the photograph I would have taken earlier, had I been arsed! Anyway, the upshot is - I think...I THINK I have a set of six, all glued together and looking relatively complete in the attic and I will dig them out and add a decent photograph of them here in the next few days, as my subconscious knew I had too.

 Only Five!

If you see them - Puckator are still doing this Discover stuff on Amazon including a pirate treasure-chest, but not these - they are worth getting, as with some care and effort, they make nice figures, and despite the above I'm grateful for Peter saving them for me and like them a lot, they are very 'Pirates of the Caribbean' in execution, but boy, who thought this was a good idea for kids?

Still to be dug-out

I hope that rope's not cast in resin!

Should you find some; the trick is to slowly rub the ends of the chest away under running water (fast running, you don't want to block the u-bend with cement!) until you find the base...if you find spiky stuff, go to the other end. Once you've found the base, you can A) hold it, and B) work slowly up the figure freeing things a bit at a time, keeping a lookout for the swords (there are three I think, we'll see when I get the other shot up here), and loose sections were there's a break (one chap has a knife or dagger that's easily broken).