Iannick's Red Templars 3rd Tactical squad (250 points)

You must know your enemy to beat him at his own game, but be ready as well for the ultimate sacrifice, for nobody comes out of hell without a scratch!

Sergeant Jean Ratcliffe, 3rd squad, 1st Company, Red Templars 

So...April. And guess what? More Marines! Yes, here's my 3rd Squad of Space Marines for my Red Templar project. All plastics from the venerable and legendary RTB01 plastic boxset. They aged well, although as usual for plastics from the 80s they do have soft details.

By now, not much to say about the colour scheme, its pretty standard stuff. Wine red, gold, etc. I thought of painting sarge Ratcliffe's leg or right pauldron in white, as my other squad leaders have a left white pauldron with terminator honours, but in the end opted not to. Figured this is the 3rd "vanilla" squad of my company, and that Sarge just got promoted from the ranks. Ratcliffe has to earn those honours!

Sergeant Ratcliffe and the boys

Although something very weird happened; this batch of marines is a lighter red hue than the rest of my force! Same recipe, same colours, etc. I did open a new bottle of Andrea red as well as a new AP wash, and I suspected the answer to my question was there. And after doing some tests I'm pretty sure I can blame AP for that one. Apparently my older (very old) AP red wash is much more dark than their new red. Now I'm not sure if it's a new recipe or due to age or such. In any cases this is literally the first time this ever happens to me. On an army scale its not really apparent, but it bugs me nonetheless as I'm don't think i'll get to replicate exactly my "original" shade.

There is a pretty cool story behind these guys. Last summer I bought a substantial lot of plastic RTB01s from a local fellow. He told me they were glued over 30 years ago using super glue. I bought the figures, put them in my pile of shame, and figured I'd come back to them in the Fall. So last November I looked a bit more closely at the figures, and started trying to disassemble them. It...did not go well. Super glue my arse! They were glued with some kind of hot glue gun, and instead of snapping nice and tidy the glue had melted the pieces together in an horrible mess. It was impossible to salvage them without some serious sculpting reconstruction (Yes, I tried the fridge and many other tricks). Even worse, they were so badly assembled almost none of them could be used as is. Panic set it, as the OWAC was very close and my first plan was to use 20 of these guys to fill two squads! I lamented my misfortune (and stupidity) on the OWAC FB page and a miracle hapenned. Challenger John Ratcliffe (hence my Sergeant's name) came to the rescue and told me he could trade me 10 unnassembled, still on sprue, RTB01 marines.

Woo! Gotta love this community, sooooo helpful. So I traded a lot of Skaven to John in exchange (which took like 4 months to reach poor John, what the hell Royal Post?!), and received these guys like two weeks later! I was relieved to say the least! I then managed to find a few metal marines to fill my other squad. 

Next month? You guessed it, more marines! But this time, 1st veteran squad. La crème de la crème. A bunch of tough looking SOBs, many without helmets.

Technical stuff : 

Red Templars tactical Squad : 250 points