The really little guys

While my core scale is undoubtedly 6mm, I have been looking for a long time at the even smaller models produced by Oddzial Osmy in 3mm scale. I decided finally to bite the bullet, and ordered a few packs of Italian troops from Fighting 15s. Great service, by the way - I ordered them on line just before midnight on Wednesday evening, and I had them in my hands on Friday morning.
The first ones I painted were a pack of medium tanks, M 13/40 - you get 15 of these for £3. I'd say my impression of these is that they are OK - you can't expect the sort of detail that you get on the larger (!) 6mm figures, and for their size these are not bad - rather like the sort of thing we got in 6mm a couple of decades ago.

Next I moved on to a pack of Berseglieri - you get 70 figures for your £3, mostly standing riflemen, but including some prone light machine gunners and mortars. As you would expect they are fairly squat - anything like true proportions at this scale and they would be far too fragile. You can make out enough to paint the flesh, boots and weapons, but it is fairly impressionistic. However my biggest problem came from the metal in which they are cast. This is very hard indeed, and while this gave no problems with the tanks, which are individual models, the infantry are cast in rows of five. You can't use them as they are, they are facing sideways in their rows, so you have to clip them apart. I was able to do this with a pair of metal cutters, but they snap apart very violently, so that I had to do it inside a small bag, to avoid losing figures as they went flying across the room (literally). Worse still, the shock of the cutting caused quite a few of the figures simply to snap off at the "ankles" - seven out of the fifty standing figures broke in this way, and while I was able to roughly glue them back on, it made them even less accurate. Basing them was as much of a chore as with their larger brethren, maybe more so as they are so fiddly to handle.

Overall I am not sure I will get any more - I will probably paint and base the ones I have. They are certainly quicker to paint than 6mm (and much cheaper) but basing is as much work, so the overall time saving is not that huge, and for me the loss of quality is quite significant.