Advice on modelling 5th Chasseurs

[Steve Edwards]

Like many of you I was well impressed by Paul Handley's recent Historex piece, the Imperial Guard Horse Artillery. How does he do it? But I was also secretly impressed by his Lucian Rousselot print of the 5th Chasseurs officer. And the germ of an idea formed in my brain cell.

No Historex for me, I'm going to do this one with Metal Modeles spare parts. I have the chasseur bits and the horse. But what I don't have is a clue how to model the shabraque. And I was wondering whether anyone had any ideas.

I've never seen anything like this before. I'm familar with the pointy shabraque borders, I think they're called Wolves Teeth or Vandykes. But these are rounded, I shall have to call them Wolves Gums or Mamdykes. It's sort of similar to the border on the panther skin job.

I did find another reference in this magnificent tome. Here's our officer from the 5th Chasseurs:

That's a lovely set of Wolves Gums. I was thinking about taking a Dremel to remove the detail from a standard cloth shabraque and then either cutting the border from a metal sheet (but how?) or rolling out some Milliput and cutting the wavey border with clay cutters.

Any thoughts?

 

[blaster]

Hi Steve,

That's an interesting figure to model. From the pic, that edging looks like a wavy strip of cloth sewn overlapping to create a scalloping effect, not wolf teeth edging (more associated with sheepskin shabraque). If you look closely, most of them seem to suggest this scalloping effect. The Bucquoy has more examples of chasseur cloth shabraques which show this scalloping edge if you look closely.

I have another book from Charmy which shows more examples of 5th chasseurs shabraques. Most of them show the wolf teeth with sheepskin shabraque. Unfortunately, this book doesn't show any cloth shabraque.

The last pic attached below was taken from one of the Rousselot Planche 41 Hussars which show a typical example in detail.

Rgds Victor

 

[blaster]

Perhaps to clarify my points, I attach more pics from the Bucquoy book as well which shows more Chasseurs with the scalloped edging shabraques.
I think that perhaps all the different types of edgings were used during the early years of the Nap Wars.
These then were standardised into wolf teeth for sheepskin shabraques, scalloping for officer animal skins and straight edges only for cloth shabraques? Just my thots.

Rgds Victor

 

[Steve Edwards]

Thanks Victor, I think you've written the book on French cavalry shabraques. I'm very grateful and you've inspired me to have a few more mad schemes on the fabrication of the border. If it was a frilly strip sewn around the edge, as in one of the examples, then maybe some anglers flat lead wire folded into pin tucks might do the trick. Very fiddly and tedious and I'll need to make a jig to get regular folds. I'd rather stab myself in the eye.

But I think your theory that it's a cloth shabraque with a scalloped edging is more likely. This is the one which later morphed into the senior officer's pantherskin model. In which case, maybe taking a resin moulding from another kit would answer.

You're all going to tell me I'm cheating! But I'm only going to cast the shrabraque edges and glue edge strips onto another horse. If only MM had a kit like this, I'd beat a path to their door. Proper modellers would just make it from putty. But I'm no proper modeller, in the words of Harry Callahan "A man's got to know his limitations".

The whole thing's just an excuse to flick through those Bucquoy books again. From time to time you get a Bruno Leibovitz moment and spot where the great man got inspired.