Painting (?) diary XXVIII + HäT 28mm French Chasseurs box opening

Of course stocks and hobby shops must interfere with my plans. I wanted to ensure I had something to paint during the coming week of holidays in case my orders don't arrive (spring holiday, yisss, with rain and cold weather) so went out on a quest for either the Zvezda peasant army or their Imperial Romans. Guess what, neither could be found.

What I bought instead is another pack of Zvezda Vikings which will be part of the 'World in Chaos' lore, the rest be top secret; and a box of Revell Prussian Infantry which was cheap (5$, seems like you pay for the size of the box and not its contents), is soft plastic (which I hate) and has a ton of flash (which I hate more). The latter will form the Blue Clans' line infantry from the long ignored JCW/JWI Imagi-Nations.

But the good news is, the HäT 28mm French infantry box has arrived and I had a look at its contents. Here's a short review because I hadn't found anything about them yet online.

There are three different boxes for the Chasseurs, this is the 'in action' one. Once I started playing SDS I'd need the 'command' box too.

The material is ugly blue hard plastic. And when I say hard I mean it. It's rigid and tough. The figures are accurately detailed. The box says you get 28 figures but there actually are 4 sprues with 8 soldiers and 10 backpacks each. I'm not good at math but that makes 32, not 28. Maybe it's taken from another box and they were lazy to correct it.

Cutting them off the sprue with the necessary tools was a pain in the arse, see the picture below how much space there is for the thing. It was the same with the Italeri horses I painted last time, but it's much worse in this case.

They are multi-part, meaning the backpacks are separate, some need gluing to stay in place, some don't. Flash and ugly mold lines are everywhere but as the plastic is hard, they are easy to trim/remove. 

One fella was missing his head, it's a problem of the mold I guess. This still leaves me with 31 figures, more than I could use now. Perhaps I'll sell them. 

The first sprue of eight figs are trimmed, assembled and undercoated. Work begins tomorrow.