Banking upon Success

From this to....(see end of post)

Yes you guessed it De Lancy now has a financial centre. A branch of The Freedman's Saving Bank to be exact. The bank actually existed for a few short years after the American Civil War but not perhaps in the South West where I am placing this one. The bank was set up to provide support to freed slaves, hence 'Freedman's' but by the early 1870s had gone bust. Given that banks were often named for their founders I thought I could use this as a bank founded by a Mr Freedman or as the actual Freedman's Saving Bank. That latter would make it an obvious target in the immediate aftermath of the war too.

The basic box frame with a start on the planking

And a start on the front façade with match stick framing

Just like the original wooden buildings I cut and applied planks to a frame.  However, in this case the frame wasn't timber scaffolding, it was a dog food box!  The build is mostly recycled cardboard also from dog food boxes.  I found that the recycling process used to make the card packaging creates a sturdy cardboard with a nice mid brown finish on the unprinted inner surfaces.  The packaging around tins of food is single ply while that around sachets is a thin corrugated card and both are great to work with.  They take paint and inks well and with a bit of stiffening from coffee stirrers hold their shape.  Best of all when given a layer of planking glued on with PVA wood adhesive they are fairly robust.

The planking effect is a bit rough and ready but I can live with that

The build wasn't particularly difficult.  I used the dog food sachet box as the frame as it had a 9.5 x 19cm footprint which fits well with other buildings.  I cut this down to the height I wanted (the original box would be great for a two storey building if you don't need access to both floors).   Planks were cut 5mm x 56mm from the single ply card .  I cut the doors and windows out and deconstructed the box for the frame so I could turn it 'inside out' as I wanted to hide the printed side under the planks and leave the brown as the inner walls.  I have settled on 20mm wide by 35mm high door spaces with a frame around the edge of the gap.  Matchsticks provided those door and window frames.  These I glued to the frame before planking.  A useful trick is to use multiples of the plank widths as the height from ground level to the window base to make planking easier.  Same at the top between the top of the frame and the roof line, not forgetting to allow for the size of the matchstick frame work around the cut outs.  once all the planks are glued in place edges can be tidied up using kitchen scissors and if you want a nice look glue an L profile edging strip around the corners to hide any ragged edges.  I didn't bother doing that for this build.  

Base added and side walk planked

To finish off I added a card board base under the building ensuring it extended 40mm beyond the building frontage to create a base for a side walk. I used some 5mm square section pine moulding rods from B&Q to lift the building and side walk off the playing surface.  I planked the sidewalk in the same way as I did the building sides.  Inside to help the card stay in shape a used more of the pine moulding as a rafter across the building to prevent the tops of the walls curving outwards and I added a counter, internal walls and a strong room.

Painting was acrylics on the frontage and staining to the other three walls using good old Agrax Earthshade on the side walk and a wash of highly diluted Vallejo Bone white  paint on the other outside walls followed by a light wash of Earthshade.

I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before someone either robs it or burns it down or both!

....to this a building with a decent Pedigree, chum

Street Map of De Lancy

Now that I have enough buildings to play a game I have had to turn my mind to how the town of De Lancy is laid out.  Previously I have stated that the town grew around an old stone block house built by the Mexican authorities back in the early 1830's so that has to be fairly central.  The Livery and Blacksmith's would be best on the outskirts of the town with corral space close by.  After that it was a case of slotting buildings in.  The initial street plan I eventually came up with looks like this.

De Lancy in1869

The solid grey blocks show buildings I already have the grey outlines are where I intend to add buildings.  The red lines are building plot boundary lines to aid me in deciding where to place stuff.  The game's ground scale is one centimetre to the yard which is slightly out compared to the figure scale.  As a result while the buildings are more in scale to the figures (I worked to roughly 1/56th scale) the ground scale for movement is about 2/3 of that.  This works for me as I prefer to have weapon ranges and movement lower than the building sizes rather than higher, I find it easier to reconcile slower movement and shorter shooting distances than I do faster and further, I clearly have more cautious shootists than average.

I'm hopeful of filling some of the spaces on Main Street and First Street before the end of the month. Longer term there will be some more MDF kit buildings and some scratch build adobe dwellings.   I have it in mind to add abank,  cafe, more stores and some residential housing in this first stage.

For my reference to town planning in the wild west I found a really useful web discussion that has really helped me plan the layout and especially with things like road widths and plot sizes.  It can be found here History 📆 - 19th century Western town layout: myth vs reality | Cyburbia | urban planning, placemaking, and more .  Its an interesting read for anyone who, like me, is on the far side of the Atlantic and too far away to visit the actual locations.

The Painting Table - April 2023

Stand by for a shock, there is some space on the painting table! This is because s a few 28mm gunfight figures have been completed. I’m hoping that my grasshopper mind will not find a new project to fill it! In turn that means that the WW2 rebasing project will be on the back burner for a while, otherwise that space is definitely going to disappear.

As if by magic a space has appeared.  I'm betting it won't last!

Well this lot would quickly fill that space upstairs!

As well as those 28mm figures I also finished a couple more small buildings for De Lancy.  The town is starting to take shape now and so I have started to think about the town layout.

Three more border ruffians, two Dixon's and one possibly Minifigs

May is already looking like being a productive month.  I have bought a couple of metres of a mottled light brown felt fabric that will be a great start for use with De Lancy.  I think with some darker areas sponged on and the occasional grass green point it will make a nice arid high plain mat.  I’m also working on more buildings with the aim of being ready for a game late in the month.  I'm still running two work spaces as there is still a temporary building construction site downstairs on the kitchen table as De Lancy grows.  I'm holding off on major purchases of MDF building kits as our tow car recently bit the dust and we are saving to buy a replacement and as a result I don't feel I can drop a £50 or so for each of the Sarissa Precision kits I fancy. 

Basis for an arid terrain cloth.  The image appears darker than reality

 Other than that there isn't much to report.

Shacking up

What De Lancy doesn’t currently have are any homes. Not everyone lived over the store or out on the range so I need some homes. Period photographs show that in frontier towns these were often little more than shacks. So I thought about it a bit and came to the conclusion that I could make shacks especially run down ramshackle ones!

The basic shape of the floor and sides is all one piece

I decided on card clad with coffee stirrers.  Foam would be good for adobe buildings but I wasn’t fully happy with the material when I made the De Lancy store model as the walls felt too thick.  Strangely the card and cladding technique felt much more robust than the foam method.  The recycled card used in a lot of pet food packaging is great for this as it is thicker than cereal box cardboard.  Fortunately we have a dog so there is usually plenty around awaiting recycling.

Sides clad and assembled, roof under way (but wonky)

The card is easy to cut and fold the tricky bit is drawing up the building plan, and even that isn’t really too hard.  Cutting the stirrers would be easier with a mini band saw but a sharp Stanley knife and a cutting mat works OK.  Corner cladding was more card with everything glued together with PVA wood glue.  to finish I gave a liberal coat of brown ink (I wanted a darker look than the timber of the bath house to suggest tarred or creosoted wood.  The flat roof is the card with a coat of Vallejo German Grey to look like tar paper.   A thinned red wash for door and window frames with a white ink wash to give a distressed look and voila it's done.

The finished article (with lurking bad guy)

The build didn't take too long all complete in probably 4-6 hours, not certain as I did it in short bursts between other stuff.   The next one will be easier now I have established the technique, I might try a shotgun house next, or even a dog run house, (honest those are real styles) or I may just make more shacks.

Let's clean up this town!

Cleanliness is next to Godliness or so they say, and as De Lancy has no church yet I thought that a bath house might be a half way decent alternative. I also had a couple of ideas on how to make some of the tented temporary buildings which often sprang up as a town was growing, so the bath house is located in just such a structure.

Basic framework done

The core of the building is made of cardboard with a balsa and coffee stirrer frontage.  The external timber footings are also coffee stirrers and the canvas is printer paper laid over the card and soaked in PVA wood glue.  A nice simple construction technique.  As always the key is to measure twice and cut once.  In this case that meant drawing the front elevation at full scale and then measuring the sides and sloped top on the drawing so I knew the dimensions to make the card tent top and sides.  I was still out by a small amount but the papier-mache covering hid that.  The trickiest part was gluing the front and back to the top and sides piece, but I got there in the end.  To create the illusion of a frame I cut some thin strips of card and glued them to the tent shape which worked rather well.  I put a groove down the centre of the coffee stirrers (length ways) to make each one look like two narrower planks and added some grooves for the ends where planks butted up against each other.

Frontage added along with 'canvas'

Painting was fairly basic; a wash of GW Agrax Earthshade over the wood work and to create the impression of shadows in folds in the 'canvas'.  I searched the web and found some useful signage that I reduced in size so it was roughly to scale. After gluing them to the frontage I added a wash of Windsor and Newton white acrylic ink to the top of the false front and some rolled up PVA soaked loo paper as rolled canvas over the doors.  and a half open curtain inside the doors.  I'm really quite pleased with the result.

First stage of painting completed

This being a bath house means that hot water would be available (for a small extra fee) so I needed to create the means of heating water.   Further Google searching gave me an example of wood fired water heating used in the 19th Century that looked easy to create.  This is a brick box with a door for fuel and an enclosed cauldron above it.   This was made from three layers of 5mm insulation foam, a skewer and the head of a roofing nail as the caldron lid. 

Around back is the water heating system and fuel

Closer view of the frontage

To flesh out the town I have also been making more fences.  There are going to be quite a few of these so to aid with that chore I created a framing tool to line everything up and mark sizes and fence post locations.  It isn't exactly high tech but it does the job.

The fence framing jig in all it's low tech glory

 

Of course you didn't expect me to stop at one new building did you?  No I didn't think so.  I have started work on a very basic shack or maybe it's going to be an outside store.  Either way it's an extra building.  As you can see in this case measure twice cut once didn't work!  Fortunately dog food card packaging is pretty forgiving and a new false floor hides a multitude of sins (and Tesco branding).  Cladding the exterior walls is a slow job and I need to go find a new Stanley knife blade as the current one is now very blunt so that's it for this post.   

Next up is a very basic shack

Have I mentioned that I hate rebasing

I really hate rebasing, really, really hate it. You think you have done a decent job on some bases and either they are the wrong size for the latest ruleset or you realise that they aren't as nice as you thought they were! In this case it's the latter situation, I based some 6mm micro armour and now I don't like the basing material I used, its a cardstock and has warped over time. So it's time for a slightly bigger and more robust base in MDF or mounting board.

You can see how this base has warped....bah!

The vehicles in question are mostly for the 1940 WW2 project which has lain unfinished (possibly they have been languishing, to be honest I haven't looked that closely in the storage box to check) for a couple or five years.  There are also some mid war Eastern Front models which were bought even longer ago, pre internet probably, as the German stuff is in Panzer grey not Dunkelgelb.  The main thing is that I need to do something with them and to finish painting the ones which are still in bare metal and to get on with rebasing the rest.

Painted 1940 German stuff, all for a rebase!

Mid war Germans for a repaint and rebase

Also from way back when is the Soviet contingent a mix of GHQ and Heroics and Ros (I think).  The hulls and the turrets could very well be miss matched!

Soviet armour, including two with lost turrets!

The Russian vehicles will do with a quick touch up and (the dreaded) rebasing.

Soviet artillery support SU-76s and an unidentified gun

Lend/Lease half tracks for Ivan probably H&R

The British Armour is mostly done with just some highlighting and shading to complete and tracks to paint.  Some of the German stuff is not even started, then their is the infantry and artillery to do.  

British Armour (GHQ) and some German transport (H&R)

Lastly I have several bags of Infantry, a battery of 25pdrs with tows, a battery of Hotchkiss 25mm AT guns and Austin tow trucks and a platoon worth of Universal Carriers to do something with.  So much lead, so little time! 

The Painting table - March 2023

I took a bit of a break from painting and modelling during March, so the report is a bit sparse this month. As regular readers will already know I finished the 2mm ACW project early in the month and towards the end of March I took a paint brush to two of my Vapnartak western shootist purchases but didn't completely finish either one. I also took a look around the various unfinished projects that litter the hobby room and decided that I would have to rebase the 6mm 1940 stuff as part of bringing that project to a conclusion, although I'm not sure that planning counts for the purposes of this monthly update!

One thing I have rediscovered is that my 6mm painting technique really doesn't cut it for 28mm stuff.  I was never a great painter at that scale and my old technique based on Humbrol enamels as used on 25 mm Hinchcliffe ancients doesn't look right, so it was back to basics.  I'm not 100% happy with my results but I'm hoping that with practice that will improve.

I have found the Galloping Major style of sculpting slightly easier to paint than the Empress figures as the folds in the clothing are more pronounced which makes shading easier.  I will have figures from both ranges completed soon and you will be able to make your own minds up as to which you prefer.

Galloping Major's 'Soldiers Free' figure