With Adepticon coming up, Andrew and I have been working on the Partiboys for a while now for the Bolt Action Doubles tournament. He’s posted some great progress on the infantry for WIP Wednesday but more work needs to be done. As part of the creation of the Partiboys, we discussed how we were going to display them, since every good army deserves a great display board. There was discussion about having them displayed moving through a ruined city, ambushing German halftracks on a woodland road or other resistance-fighter-esque scenarios. But these are our partisans, and boy, do they like to party. From the beginning we’ve been calling them the Partiboys as anyone who follows us has probably seen. And the Partiboys deserve a proper Partibus.

Almost immediately (I think it was actually the day that Andrew and our friend Dexter actually thought up the double partisan idea, back at Operation Sting in November) we found a model of an old Parisian autobus. This model is horrifically oversized for Bolt Action (1/24 scale for the bus as opposed to 1/56 for proper BA vehicles) but we realized the bus itself would be amazing as a display for the army.
The kit we found is an Autobus Parisian TN6 C2 from the French company Heller. We ordered it on Amazon through a toy store in Austria and about a month later it arrived. At over 22 inches long and 15 inches high this 196 piece model kit also includes a decal sheet of French advertisements as well as actual rubber tires. The bus was a pain to put together. Some steps required parts to be threaded through already assembled components and it look a large amount of time trying to figure out exactly how some pieces fit. In the end there were a few pieces we left off in the engine area because they weren’t fitting properly and… well… you literally cannot see the area at all when the model is fully assembled.

We haven’t finalized the conversion work yet, as there are a few ‘parti’ related tweaks and some cleanup that still need to be done. We did remove the seats and add a layer to the interior of the bus so that the 28mm models are raised up and better visible through windows (having it as a flat surface on the interior also allows us to fit more of the Partiboys into the bus itself as part of the display). It’s also important to note that the bus hasn’t received any paint yet, it comes in multiple colored plastic (although the instructions tell you exactly which paints should go where to get the same look as the bus on the box). We’re going to have to do some masking over the windows and probably the rubber tires as well when we prime and airbrush the vehicle.

Additionally, we received the latest batch of Partiboys, this set from Footsore Miniatures out of the UK. It took a solid month from shipment notification to arrival which was disappointing, but now that they are here I’ll be getting them based up and primed and we can start the painting. We need to update our inventory lists, but we probably need to order about 30 more infantry total. Lots to do, in just two and half months until the event!