A Viking Battle Shed

 With a podcast and a load of painting all at the "finishing touches" stage, I thought I'd sneak out a few photos of Forged in Battle's Viking War Shed, which I picked up as the prize at the WAR 1-dayer competition earlier in the year. 

OK, technically it's a WE-F55 Meade Hall but I'm sure they may have also kept the odd lawnmower and set of garden tools in there too.

The model is a 2-part resin structure, with the roof being separate to the base. There is no internal detail so the roof just gets glued on after placing the posts around the sides.

The pillars and gable ends are separate metal pieces which need to be glued into holes in the base - some of which I had to drill out to take the lug on the metal beam. This was very easy to do with a pin vise, as the resin drills out easily enough.  

Some of the beams then needed snipping down a bit at the top as well to fit under the roof, and a couple needed building up with filler to join up with the roof once it was glued in place too. 

I painted it in a black Gesso undercoat, with many layers of different drybrushed browns and (eventually) pale grey and bleached bone.

Here it is with some 15mm 2 Dragons figures for scale.

I think it has come out as a very nice little building - useful for that Village next to the Waterway that the Vikings, Rus and Saxon types all like to have to narrow the table down so their shieldwall can't get outflanked!

 

Building Renovation Project

As part of the "desert modern" restoration project I've slowly been working through recently I came into possession of a large number of 1/300th scale buildings as well as the aforementioned hundreds of tanks and vehicles - in fact, far too many to use sensibly.

A number of these buildings have now been donated to the CLWC storage cupboard for club use, and the remainder I decided to mount onto hardboard to create a series of easily portable and deplyable towns and hamlets for CWC, copying the European buildings I already own (which are much nicer as they were pro-painted and made by Timecast).

In gluing the buildings to each small baseboard I managed (just about) to leave enough space on most of the edges to fit in a handful of my AFV's - all of which are based on 20mm wide and 30-40mm deep bases.

This allows a number of tanks to be placed in each town able to shoot out, but also makes it impossible to deploy a line of tanks in the cover of the BUA in that terrible 'wheel to wheel' style seen far too often on armour-based games.

Or, put another way, anyone using these towns is now forced to be sensible in how they put their AFVs on table !

 The ground is my usual builders sand, stained with woodstain and then drybrushed - given I also did the AFV bases this way they are of course a near-perfect match.

 My final sort-of clever idea here was to cut the bases for the town / village elements out of a single sheet of A4 hardboard, which means that they all now fit perfectly in an A4 Really Useful storage box when they are not in use... as this picture shows.

Look! I built a Town!

Picking ridiculous projects and then almost finishing them is a classic wargamers curse, and the process of building a whole Malifaux faux-gothic-steampunk town almost from scratch instead of just coughing up for some pre-built buildings is a pretty good way of ticking that particular "curse" box, as I can now demonstrate with the following series of photos and construction hints and tips.

Learn how this came to pass here on my website