OMWB: Newten Town New District WIP 4

Progress with refurbishing my buildings. Above a cleaned up building where the corner had been broken and part lost. Rebuilt using a mix of Kneadite and Milliput.

Below is another broken resin building showing how I used some Mulberry rice paper to strengthen the brittle wall.

I then put spread some lines of super glue on the paper, drawing connections between the fragmented pillars, and the remaining wall. I made this solid by sprinkling baking soda on top of the super glue to make a rigid connection for sculpting a new wall on top of the paper. 

I forgot to take a picture of the unpainted wall, but it looked a lot like what is in the top picture. After priming the model, I noticed a part of the wall needed to be made thicker.

 

Hence the unpainted Kneadite and Milliput you can see above. 

Over the hols I shall be flocking the bases, adding rubble, and begin the painting to make these buildings ready for the tabletop.

Catch you all on the bounce.

A Blast from the Past

 

Apropos of a post on Facebook about resin buildings, I made a few buildings back in the day for running demo games. The owners of Fantasy Forge saw them at a convention and asked if I could make a few more for a range to use with BattleTech.

I said yes, of course I could, and I rumaged my spares box and made what you see here for them.

Above, the two smaller buildings, are the same model, just showing the back and front. Made from Eagle Transporter pods cut to fit, with Plasticard corrugated sheet for the roofs.

The center building is a repurposed air-freshner. My original master was taller, but Fantasy Forge couldn't get consistent casts from the moulds, which meant they cut it down in size you see here.

Below, the building on the left was built up using four Eagle Transporter modules, with some Airfix Panther tank wheels, a bottle cap and sundry spares. Finished off with corrugated plasticard, filler, and a dome from the Plastruct range.  

Above, the one on the right was a cap from something and a elliptical dish from the Plastruct range who are makers of components for architectural model makers.

Below, the building on the left is made from two Apollo Lunar Lander halves, two Enterprise hangar doors, and sundry Plasticard gribblies.

Above, the building on the right was made from two Panther tank turrets, and jet engine cowlings from whatever I had in my bits box. Plasticard gribblies, and another dome from the Plastruct range to finish.

I made these when I had a serious spares box collected from the days when I worked in a hobby store and could get my hands on spare sprues.

Hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving day. Catch you all later.

OMWB: Newten Town New District WIP 3

More progress with refurbishing my buildings. Above is a repaired long building, which had suffered a break at one end. I rebuilt the missing wall with Milliput, and carved in the brick courses.

To repair the damaged roof I added a plasticard base to reinforce it, then added filler. After this had set, I carved in the roof tiles.

The end result is a bit sloppy, but should suffice for a damaged building.

Below you can see where I've glued Mulberry rice paper to line the walls, because experience tells me the resin tends to break if knocked. And building are easily knocked.

And again below, you can just about tell that the far resin wall window post has broken. I shall rebuild it with Milliput, repeating what I did with the building at the top of this post..

 

Not shown are the reworked floors for both of the buildings above.

One of the floor's lacked any detail, and the others were a tad shallow, which is probably accurate, but these are building for wargames, so I scribed them all to make the planks stand out more when they're drybrushed.

That's all for now. Catch you all on the bounce.

OMWB: Newten Town New District WIP 2

 

And the work continues. This refurbishment project has taken me longer to progress than my first estimate of a couple of weekends. Like real life building projects I'm overrunning my completion date, and estimated cost.

I took the four buildings above, and arranged them thus.

The four buildings now make two larger structures on plasticard bases sized to represent pavement.

I ended up having to scribe the floors to deepen the relief to make the grooves stand out. WHat can't be seen is all the fiddly filing to clear excess resin from windows, and fill in obvious seems where walls were butted up against each other.

I also added some Milliput on the oblong building to reinforce the floor between the two halves, as without it, the base flexed.

 So, that's three building down, and six to go.

Yep, I may be some time.

OMWB: Newten Town New District WIP 1

So, this weeks tales of adventure, its a story of two steps forward, one step back, as I began re-working this building.

My objective is to fettle what I saw as faults with the model. I didn't do any serious prep when I first painted it back circa 2016 'ish.'

The circa and 'ish' are doing a lot of work here, as the first boards were built in 2010. 

 

Yeah, I'm an inveterate fiddler who can't leave stuff well enough alone. This was the building I removed from the original town board to paint graffiti on the other buildings as seen here.

 

I started by cleaning up the resin building by removing blemished and defects that arose when poured into a mold. This included filling in gaps, and getting rid of seems in the original master, using plastic putty.

Then added a base with a pavement around the structure. After that I reworked the roof, which I managed to completely muck up big time, as can be seen below.

 

My first attempt ended up warping, from a combination of using a piece of 20 thou plasticard and 'No More Nails' glue to try and level the roof casting. The 'No More Nails' didn't harden properly, and as a consequence the resin roof warped.

So I snapped it apart, and rebuilt it on a thicker 40 thou piece of plasticard. Twenty thou is half a mil, and 40 thou is 1 mil thick. I also used super glue to make sure it stuck together, and then filled in all the cracks to restore the roof to a serviceable condition.

A serviceable condition meaning, bashed and battered, but still functionally a roof.

And this is as far as I got over the course of a weekend. All of the above is a lot of work for very little forward progress.

I'll catch you all on the bounce.

OMWB: Newten Town New District

It has been a while, seven years it seems, since I posted anything about my buildings for wargames. How time seems to slip through ones fingers.

Anyway, I decided, after seeing what the Too Fat Lardies were doing with their terrain that I could take a leaf out of their book. My town terrain boards are super fab, but each square fixes what buildings go where in a town.

I want more flexibility, I want the freedom to arrange my towns however I gorram please.

So, after much procrastination, I decided rather than finish off the last four town boards I have to hand, I would chop them up and re-build the buildings on their own discrete base. This would have the added advantage of getting rid if the seams in the road too.

An added bonus from doing a town this way.

And while I was doing all of this I looked at one of the resin buildings and decided to file out all the scarf left by the limitations of the way they were molded.

My beloved couldn't tell the difference between the building on the left, and the one on the right. Clue, the one on the right has the window frames filed clean.

 That's all for now, catch you on the bounce.

The Badlands Assemble

The Badlands Assemble doesn't quite have the same ring to it as The Avengers Assemble, but I've had these sitting in a box ever since the original Heavy Gear KickStarter arrived, which was two years ago.

Doesn't time fly?

I've been feeling a bit out of sorts, because the side-effects of my medication is a bit rough, which is why I missed last weeks post. 

I felt I needed to do something to cheer me up that wouldn't get bogged down if fiddly details. So I got these models out of the box and cleaned them to get the grease off. I find windscreen wash, which has isopropyl alcohol and a wetting agent, is good for this. 

Anyway, this was about the limit of what I could manage.

Mogadishu 2 Update

  

It has been a while since I posted any updates on my AK47 Republic armies and terrain, but today I started work on developing the downtown boards for the games I plan to play. I'm sure Martin B. will be pleased to see me post these. Wave Martin you are on my blog!

To give a sense of scale, there is a squad of my warlords militia and a couple of technicals too.

Part of what drove me to start on these is the fact that the Reading Warfare wargames show this coming weekend. I went last year and saw these Fieldworks building at the show, and the shame of having them sitting since I got them at Xmas was just too much to bear. After all, I can hardly ask for more if I haven't finished painting the last lot, can I?

Anyway, if all things go according to plan I'm off to Warfare again on Saturday, and I'm taking some cash with me (as they don't do plastic) to specifically buy some more of this companies excellent products.

I will say that these look even more impressive that I've now set them into their own boards. 

I originally made the my town boards generic tiles, which I just intended to place buildings on as needed for games, but the end result was not very convincing to me. Why, because one of the things that really bugs me (only one of the things, jeez who am I trying to kid) are buildings that are not bedded into the ground. It just doesn't look right to me.

I've also re-thought how I'm tiling my town. Originally I planned to make tiles that had ways to place them together to suggest roads etc. by just placing buildings in a rectangular pattern. My plan is now to set each building into a terrain board, and modelling any alleyways or roads as I feel fits best. A bit random, but I will also have central connection points on a lot of the boards, which can also act as links to create scenes that flow.

Downtown Mogadishu 1

  

I got a bunch of buildings for Xmas from the 15mm range from Fieldworks, which are still awaiting their turn through the Paint-it-Pink workshop. Given that it is now June and they are still in the plastic bags I guess I'll be lucky to get them finished by next Xmas at the rate I'm going.

However, some of the buildings in this post don't appear to be available for sale at this time. Sorry about that, they obviously withdraw and replace models according to sales.

I'm tempted to buy another three of the above building, which is still available, so that I could make a square block using them around a crossroad, or alleyway. All of the buildings in the Fieldworks range come with accessible interiors thorough using removable floors and roofs. The pictures below show how the interior works.

Overall, I think these are pretty neat buildings, and I really must get around to painting them soon.