Friday, September 4, 2009

Spanish Buildings

While at Historicon this summer, I picked up a few Spanish-style buildings from Brigade Games for our Carlist Wars project. Of course, these will work equally-well for my Napoleonic collection (and my slowly growing Spanish army). The buildings are made of familiar yellow-ish resin and are well-cast with only very minor imperfections, such as tiny air bubbles. When they came out of the bags they smelled quite strongly of moth balls but most of this was done away with by a good scrub in dish soap. This, of course is normal procedure anyway to rid the pieces of any mold-release agents and oils from my hands, while scraping them. There was, in fact, little scraping to do to make the pieces fit together. Inevitably with resin castings, there are going to be areas that don't fit snugly, and these models are no exception. A quick scrape and carve, especially along the long joints of the walls does the trick nicely. I used No More Nails to glue the pieces together and LePage's wood filler to close the gaps. The bases are cut from 1/8" MDF with a jig-saw, with the edges sanded to get rid of the sharp edges.

I design my bases to hold four 50mm x 50mm figure bases, since my entire Napoleonic collection is mounted on these. When we use Field of Battle rules, one unit may occupy a structure (meant to represent a built up area, city block, or building complex), and having bases that each neatly fit one unit eliminates any ambiguities about what is and isn't in the buildings. The models were glued to the bases with No More Nails. I plan to add extra walls and fences to the bases to add some variety and chronicle the progress here. For the time-being, here are some shots of the basic models glued to the bases.

This is a small stable with removable roof. The wooden doors are cast as separate pieces and will be painted apart for easy access then glued in later. I plan to add some cobblestones to the yard and fences to surround it.

A small house or shack, again with a removable roof. I haven't decided what to add to the base but probably some combination of walls and fences.

Another small house, this time two-story with removable roof. This one will receive a high wall to surround the yard.
This will be the centerpiece of my little Spanish village. The building itself is two stories, although I made only the lower roof removable. The wall sections come as a separate pack. Unfortunately, Brigade Games was out of the gate section at Historicon so I plan to scratchbuild a gate to the yard. The joins between the wall sections (at the corners) will also receive a filler post of some sort.

This is the beast I eventually want to purchase from Brigade Games. How cool will this be in skirmish games?

2 comments:

  1. This range of buildings made me regret a little my choice of going to 40MM for Sharp Practice. There's little to have as nice as this in 40MM. Although "Touching History" has some nice scratch building ideas for Spanish structures.

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  2. That's one of the reasons I was dissauded from 40mm, despite all the excellent figures to be had!

    Dave

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