Introduction

“Ello, ello, ello. What’s all this then?” Well, keeping to his promise to make some figures more out of left field, it’s a figure of a British Policeman WW2 from Pete Morton of Jakrei Miniatures Although it is labeled as WW2 I think the uniform is suitable for figures from the thirties to at least the early fifties. I don’t have a lot of reference material for British Police Uniforms so I am open to correction on that.

The Kit

The figure comes in an attractive black box with colour photo of the painted figure on the top. Inside bedded on a pieceof foam is the figure in a ziplock bag. The figure consists of four parts: The torso including the legs, the two arms and the head which is wearing the distinctive British Bobby’s helmet. The parts are well cast in white metal with only the faintest seam lines. The left arm has a piece of the casting lug attached which needs to be filed away. The helmet and the face are nicely detailed. The figure is posed standing with his left arm down by his side, looking to his right and with his right arm raised in a halting gesture. On his arms he wears white traffic control sleevelets.

Assembly

I first cleaned up the seam lines and the remains of the casting lugs on the figure and did some dry fitting, the arms were a good fit but the neck of the figure was a little long. Usually with a resin or plastic figure I drill the neck hole out but in this case I used an Xacto saw blade to cut the neck short. Remember the old adage here –Measure twice, cut once. I used Loctite superglue to join the parts. There was a small gap under the right arm which I filled with putty. I drilled a hole in the figures foot and glued a piece of wire in for ease of handling. I then washed the figure with soapy water to clean any oils from my fingers from it and left it to dry. When dry I attached the figure to the handle of a modelling knife to avoid any unnecessary handling. I primed the figure using a can of Games Workshop Skull White and left it at that for the moment. Usually I paint layers of washes over the white base coat but I’m not sure that would work with a black uniform.

Conclusion

This is a well designed and cast figure which I predict will appear at many modeling shows in the future. The torso also lends itself to conversions of many 19th century and early 20th Century uniforms.