Leven Miniatures: January Releases

Here are some new releases from Leven Miniatures! But for those who missed the initial posts and are wondering who's Leven Miniatures. Here's a short introduction I have found on his site filled in with some of his newest releases!

Back in the 1970's I spent much of my spare time with friends working on battle orders for various active war games I was involved with, both as referee and player. It was during this period that we decided to expand our small 3' x 3' board to an 8' x 8' board consisting of interchangeable 2' x 2' panels. The board layout was improved from a flat board painted green to contoured boards with roads, rivers, hillsides and even a port area. The buildings at this time were simply cardboard squares cut out and placed on the board to denote the location, and the type of building was simply written on the card. After a time we progressed to painted wooden blocks.

Eventually, I found a supplier of resin buildings at 6mm scale and purchased a few. This was all very well, but on an 8 foot square board, we found we needed dozens of buildings to make the diorama look believable, and the shop-bought models were way more than we could afford. I improved on the wooden blocks to make them look more realistic, but I was still not satisfied with their appearance, and I decided that I would attempt to remake the buildings along the lines of the one's we had bought, so using cardboard to face the wooden blocks I cut out the doors and windows etc. Finally, once I had improved my models I progressed to making rubber moulds and resin casts.

When I left the area, I packed up all my war-gaming stuff, and it stayed in my loft for years. By that time, computers were providing excellent wargame simulations, so that was the route I took. When I decided to clear out my entire collection last year, I put them all on eBay. Both the vehicles (over 4,000 of them), and the buildings went very well, and I realised that there was still a market for them. I trawled the internet for what was available and found that availability in 6mm scale was still relatively limited, so I made a couple of new buildings of my own to test the market. After that, and being RAF biased, I decided to produce a range of airfield & military buildings, and put these out to see what happened, and basically, I'm still doing it.

Stay tuned as a review of the previous releases is coming soon!