Building Empires at War kit of Fly's photography studio

If you are going to do wild west gaming at some point the gun fight at the OK Corral is going to appear on your 'to do' list. Empires at War are the only supplier I'm aware of which do buildings in 28mm for the OK Corral.

The first thing to say is that the Fly's studio kit scales almost exactly to the ground footprint on the Sandborn map which is a big bonus to me and the kit looks great when completed.  Delivery turn around was excellent, I received my parcel within a week of ordering even though I used the cheapest postage option, Royal Mail second class post.  I bought two buildings, Fly's  lodging house and photography studio and the Harwood house because those two buildings define the space the gunfight occurred in.  In this post I will look at building Fly's lodging house and photography studio, I will cover the Harwood house build in a second post.

Unpacking the kit, there are over 90 parts.

The kit itself is rather nice although it is a more complicated build than either the Warbases or Sarissa Precision MDF items I have previously put together.  It also features an interesting double wall construction system.  All of the outer walls of the building come as two parts that glue together back to back, which means laser etching inside and out when completed.  There are decent instructions with photos which give a step by step walk through of the building process.  Although these images give enough detail to build the kit, I would have liked them to have been larger to allow the trickier  construction details to be clearer.   Perhaps adding them to the online store would be an option?

These are the four supports for placing the end panels on the hipped roof.  I was puzzled by them for a while!

Clamping the two part gable end walls together

I only have two minor points about the physical components firstly there are no internal walls (possibly because we don't know what the internal layout was) and second the roof assembly is rather fiddly.  That is because the flat roof panels are finished off with sets of separate slats.  Those are an exact match in shape and size on the two main roof panels but need trimming for the porch and the roof of the photo studio itself.  It's not a major issue with a set of side cutters, but I would have expected that with the precision of laser cutters those parts could have been pre cut to be an exact match.  Again to give the benefit of the doubt this may be because it reduces the risk of breakage when popping those parts out of the MDF sheet as they are rather thin.  What I do like is that they are laid out rather like the teeth of a comb with a spine holding them the correct distance apart which makes positioning fairly simple.

Here you can see the roof slats prior to trimming

As I mentioned the build itself was a level of difficulty higher than the previous kits I have made up but even then with a bit of thought it came together well.  I'd say that this is a kit where a dry run to make sure you are certain that you know where everything goes is vital.  Time spent there will ensure a good build.  I also found that it was necessary to build one part of the building and then clamp it and put it aside while the glue set rather than trying to do the whole thing at once.  However, by doing that I ensured a good fit on things like the two piece walls and roof sections (but see below).  If you are in any doubt, the photos on the web site of the finished model are a really useful aid to checking how things should go together.

Fixing the roof panel to the underlying frame

The only part of the build that gave me problems was the roof of the small photo studio to the rear of the main building.  This is a hipped roof where there are four roof panels two that form the main roof coming together at a ridge and two triangular end sections that lean inwards and are joined to the sides of the main sections (see image).  After building this I found some of the fit I had achieved wasn't great, this was down to me not the accuracy of the kit's parts though.  The best advice I can give is to build the underlying roof frame and then to use blue tack or double sided tape to test fit the four outer roof sections before getting busy with the glue!  I made a mess of that but was able to use some bits of the MDF 'sprue' to fill in the unwanted gaps I had created.

The roof of the photo studio.  I should have mounted the big roof panels so that the tops touched 

I only really ignored the instructions on one point which was the placing of the windows.  The instructions seem to be saying to fit the windows to the internal wall section with the window frames to the outside panel.  I did this with those on the smaller photo studio part of the building.  I found that it made any minor mismatch between the inner and outer wall sections really stand out.  So for the main building I set them into the outer wall section but with the rear of the window frame flush with the back of that part (see the sketch below).  I much prefer the look that way.

Sketch of my window placement looking in cross section from above

Overall this is a very nice representation of the actual building.  The double wall panel system creates a really robust basic structure.  The pre-painted parts show a bit of laser burn staining but I don't mind that as it looks like weathering.  If I hadn't liked it, it would be easy enough to touch up.  I didn't feel the need to add anything, other to hide my errors on the studio roof and a ridge piece to the main roof.  The only paint I needed to apply was some grey to the ends of the roof slats to hide where they had been trimmed.  This model will take pride of place on my table anytime a western shoot out game is played and I wouldn't hesitate to buy other kits from Empires at War.