Terrain Weekend

Bryan and I took some time to paint up and assemble some of the buildings I had cut out with the laser.  I have to say that the painting took longer than expected.  The assembly on the kidney shaped building did too.

The results?  Here are some pics of the building and catwalks we assembled. 

Learned plenty on this weekend.  The prime and paint we used made the process of painting these buildings longer than it needed to be.  There were some problems with a few of the building segments that we found when we assembled them.  We found that very thin segments could be quite brittle.  There's a set of windows with a thin sill that are just waiting to be broken by a misplaced hand.  Also, the kidney shaped building was a fail.  Took a lot of time to design, cut and assemble and the finished product looks cheap and amateur.

The buildings we did assemble have the designed effect.  Cheap, simple, effective terrain that's strong, fully functional and storable.  Below are some pictures of those buildings in storage mode.  All the buildings are storable in russian doll mode.

The building below is all three buildings stored in one.

Next steps:  Lots of touch-ups yet to do on the paint.  Plenty of other building, painting and assembly to do.  I have an L-shaped building and a balcony building designed.  I'd also like to recut the roof of one building roof that's pretty sloppy.

Laser Cut Buildings

I've always has trouble with making buildings for wargames.  The problem is in the windows.  Drills make round holes in wood and mortising tools are not nearly as good as they promise in their ads.  I made a full Russian Tank factory once and had no trouble with the factory but the office windows were a debacle.  Drill, saw, drill, saw, saw, saw, drill -- took forever.

To get around the window problem, I tried cutting out a building wall from a piece of MDF but found that my tablesaw cut straight but couldn't cut square especially for small pieces.  Not a good tool for making miniature terrain.

After seeing all the recent startups using lasers to make buildings, I looked around and found one for rent.  First step was to design a throw-away building I call Building 0.  I have no intention of making any/many of these but it's here to build some skills around the drawing program and make the mistakes around fabricating.  Here's a cut-out of the roof of Building 0 and a staircase.

 

Once cut with lasers, the walls come out like this: 

 

It's a very simple setup -- 6"x6" building with 3" floors.  Here's what it looks like with just the base plus the roof section.  (I will apologize right now for some truly lousy photography)

The roof has a balcony around the top with cutouts to allow for walkways to be added.  I also made a middle floor that I can copy to be floor 2, 3, 4, etc.

I learned several things with this building. First and foremost -- the engraving I did on the outside of the building takes a LONG time to print. Plain old cuts take much less time. Granted they're less interesting but for quantity, I need to lose the engraving.  Also, the joinery I used presumed the MDF was uniformly 1/8" but I found it's a few fractions of a millimeter smaller in most cases.  The holes I cut for holding things together (mortices) need to get a little thinner.

Here's the simple building with a staircase going up the side to the second floor. 

After putting it in play, I found that my proportions were off. It looks good but the rise needs to be steeper and the stairs need to end higher.

 

I also built a 6" walk way to go between buildings.  I don't have a building for it to go to -- so it's just propped up against a middle floor for Building 0. 



The walkway's a little off in the ratios too -- the railing is too low and the walkway isn't very interesting overall. Needs some cutouts or a railing.

 

Here's what the building looks like with the base, the middle floor and the roof.

The next step is to print a few more middle floors and paint it up.  Look for another post in about a week.