Tommygun Towers & Sloped Roof Shanty

So to the next build. This actually consists of two different models, both of which are free to download from www.modelpaperworld.com and were designed by Tommygun; they are the 'Towers' and 'Sloped Roof Shanty' kits. I call them kits as both of the pdf files have bits to enable the creation of mulitple different buildings - marvellous value I thought! ;) Again Ironclad Miniatures' 28mm Tobias miniature is providing a size reference.

You can see to the left the finished products. Also in the picture are the contents of a set of ladders from Warbases which I was going to use to create a ladder up the side of the smaller tower. However, when writing this post I saw that Warbases now do a long ladder set, so instead of having to glue 2 of these shorter ladders together, I will probably get the longer set and use them.

Anyway, the towers themselves are very simply made - glue the prints from the file around a pringles tube, stick the top cover on and that's it - job's done! Just use elastic bands to keep them in place (as in suggested in the file). The shorter tower was made with a tube of supermarket's own brand version of pringles and adds a nice touch of variety IMO. I think of them as some kind of storage tank - some liquid (fuel maybe) or gas perhaps, so made the small building as a 'control room' of sorts. My intention is create a scenic base for the towers and building with a chainlink fence of some sort surrounding it.

To the right is closer view of the building's exterior and the Warbases' ladder. Also, you can see the excellent texture of the towers.

The building itself is a hackabout of one of the buildings in the shanty file and I'm very pleased with how it's come out

Finally to the left is the interior of the control building. There are no interior details for the buildings in the shanty file, so I used the exterior prints to line the interior walls and the floor is, yet again, provided by Dave Graffam Models' Low Ruins set.

I am very pleased with these buildings; now I just have to pull my finger out and build the base for them!

Finger and Toe 01 - Multi-Storey Warehouse

This post covers my build of Finger and Toe Models' Multi-Story [sic] Warehouse which is available to download from Wargames Vault at (time of typing) for £2.40.

To begin with, to the right, you can see my finished build of the model, with an Ironclad Miniatures' 28mm Tobias miniature in front to give an idea of the building's size. Also, the pavement (US: sidewalk) surrounding the building is not part of the building; it is from Grekwood Miniatures' 28mm Residential Roads pdf (IMO the best representation of UK pavements I've got).

The building was made with 5mm foamcore for the walls and base; the roof and interior 'floors' from 2mm mounting board.

As is my (now) usual practice, I've removed all the doors and windows from the building - it does come with them! The building itself is - as the title claims - multi-storEy; it has parts for a ground level, what it calls upper story [sic] and then a top story [sic]. This enables you to have as many 'upper' storeys as you might want and they are designed in the model to be removable, but for my build I've fixed them all together and only used the one upper storey.

To the left you can see the right and rear sides of the building as seen in the first pic - the corner pointing at the camera is the one that was on the back right in the first pic. I made a change to the designed model here - the wall with no windows that is now at the back of the ground level is actually one of the upper storey walls, but I reasoned that it would be more likely that the ground floor would have no windows so swapped the 4-window ground floor wall with this 0-window upper storey wall. Making this swap also enabled me to have 4-window walls front and back for the upper and top storeys.

To the right you can see the left and front of the building. This shows the single door entrance at the back of the left side.

As the building is designed to have its interior used, it does come with interior surfaces, has a staircase model included and even has 2 pages of alternate doors and windows! There are storey 'connectors' that will disguise the join if you made a disassembling version of the building, but as I haven't, I've not used them.

And finally the last pic shows the interior. As you can see, I've not made floors for the building, instead I've rabbeted mounting board into the walls where the floor would have been. The board has then been covered with the wooden floor supplied in the model (which is quite a good one actually) and the ground floor is the concrete floor from the model. You can make out the yellow and black stripes on the ground floor - above this on each floor there is a slightly smaller similar area that represents where a lift would allow access for heavy goods to each floor.

Given its modular nature, it would be relatively easy to make a taller and/or wider version of this building. At £2.40, the versatility of this model is, IMO, good value.

Note: I don't have the building with me or I would have given its dimensions; when I'm back with it, I'll try and remember to add them to this post

Buildings and ANMA

Well, I've finally taken pictures of most (but not all!) of the buildings I've made (relatively) recently. As I said previously I'll do a post on each - hopefully quite quickly!  Before I start that series of posts, though here's a teaser/montage of the ones I've taken pictures of...

Also, I've actually managed to play a game!  Shock!! It was a board game from Wargame Vault - Astro Navis Merchant Advanced (ANM). It's a space trading game and when you get it you get a basic version as well as the advanced version. When you've printed the components off and set up to play a game, it does seem quite complicated - as the picture indicates - but it's actually really quite easy to play.

I managed to get a 'minor win' result for my first basic game which was pleasing! I got this game ages ago, and my recent interest in it has been to use as a framework and scenario generator for the Five Parsecs from Home sci-fi skirmish rules. I believe that it will be great for this, especially given the 'events' included in the advanced version of ANM, which is my planned next test.

The basic version of ANM is, IMO, too reliant on dice rolls - one bad roll can really hurt your chances of winning, but the extra rules in the advanced version will reduce this by a great deal. I am going to make one change to the rules, but I'll report on that after I've played the advanced game.

New Rules

Well so much for a post a day ... in my defence, the lighting in my hotel room is so awful that the pictures I've taken have been absolutely rubbish and unworthy of publishing. Anyway, going home tonight, so I hope to have posts of my buildings up soon.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd let you know about 2 of the new rulesets that I've got recently:

Five Men in Normandy - skirmish rules that I picked up during Wargame Vault's recent 'summer offensive' sale. The clue being in the title, they are designed for small skirmish actions, but there is provision for up-sizing the number of combatants. I'll reserve posting any more about them at present as I've only read them, but I will say that I have a good feeling about them and am eager to give them a try. There is also a new supplement to cover zombies!!  (I'd put a link to them, but can't connect to WV right now; as WV is back up, I've added the links)

Sabre Squadron - "is the new set of rules for company-level wargaming from the Cold War to the Digital Age" as it says on the website.  Currently being developed, the free version you get is called 'Rapid Deployment' and can be got by sending an email to them (details on the page linked to above). Again this reads very well and leave me wanting to give it a try - just need to get some russkies done!

Speaking of russkies, I've been trying very hard to not buy some of Brigade Model's lovely 15mm SF neo-Soviet tanks and ArmiesArmy 15mm infantry to oppose and support them ... I don't actually NEED another project to start, but they are very, very shiny and wonderful and the world would be a much better place if I bought them and precious says I must .....  HELP ME!!!! 

  ;)

Dave Graffam Models 07 - Coach House

The first detailed report on my recent building spree covers Dave Graffam Models' Coach House (curerntly a 'Copper Best Seller' and a 'pay-what-you-want' product on Wargames Vault).

In my last post on a Dave Graffam Models' (DGM) build ( dave-graffam-models-5-low-ruins ) I said that I was using 2mm board as a building material.  Since then, however, I've become disenchanted with that as it looked too thin next to 28mm models. I've now started using 5mm foamboard for the walls instead (which looks much better IMO!), although I still use 2mm board for roofs.

As you may be aware, DGM use the 'layers' functionality in Adobe Acrobat to provide the builder with many different options for the model's surface finish and placement of doors and windows. For this version of the Coach House, I decided on the 'brick' finish and not to use the 'Coach Door'.

In the first pic to the left you can see the north wall of the model. I've cut through the foamboard to create openings where the windows and doors appear on the prints of the model and coloured in the exposed white foam with a permanent black marker

To the right is a pic of the building's southern wall, again with the windows cut out, although the one at the peak of the wall was too small to bother with IMO.

The unfortunate thing about DGM buildings is that they do not come with any interior detail at all, so if you want to use the interior, you need to come up with something to use there.  This pic shows what I've done. The wooden flooring is from DGM's Low Ruins Set, while the interior walls are the Coach House's walls with no 'wall' layer selected. This gives an off-white finish to the wall with green and grey streaks that - to me anyway - looks like a neglected plaster finish. It's far superior to leaving it as bright white foamboard anyway! You can also see that I've 'framed' the openings in the walls with black marker

This second pic of the interior shows what I've done with the first (or second if you're American) floor. With previous builds, I'd made a removable floor (as you can see at the end of this post - dave-graffam-models-1-pub), but, through use, I'd found that unsatisfactory (constantly having to remove it to get to the ground floor and having it discarded on the table when not used, being 2 reasons). So now, I've decided to make a platform from 2mm board that I rabbeted into the foamboard wall where there are windows and covered it with bits of the low ruins floor piece. I hope that this solution will be more satisfactory.

This final pic shows the interior of the ground floor. You can see that I've not made any furniture for the build, nor do I intend to.  It struck me as I was beginning this series of builds that my aim is not to create detailed model buildings, but rather create terrain for wargames - hence the lack of furniture. Following this logic, I am unsure at present whether or not to put doors on the buildings ...  I might do so as they could be useful for zombie games - i.e. to indicate if the door is shut or not.

I think that I will (at some point!) build another version of this building actually as a Coach House! :)