City Waterfront
This section of terrain is my entry into the Mini Realms terrain competition. I was planning a waterfront section to be added to my city for a while and since the competition is to design a 'supply point' of some kind for your chosen game setting I thought I'd combine the two. Here are all the basic rectangles for one of the warehouses; the only thing missing is the ground level interior floor, which will be cut when the building is assembled.
The holes have been cut for the doors and windows.
The main doors to the warehouses are hinged unlike the previous warehouses I’ve made. The doors are made from the original cutout from the front wall, cut in half and trimmed down by eye so it’s no longer a tight fit in the opening.
The hinges are masking tape. Originally I’d planned to have hinges made of dowel held to the walls by brackets. Masking tape does the same job cheaper and much more easily. One possible source of stress and swearing overcome! The supports for the ground floor, which has to be raised above street level to accommodate the height of the wharf, are matchsticks glued in place with wood glue. These are about £2.00 per 1000 and are a very good modelling resource, more will be used later for the window sills and door frames as usual.
The windows are made from 5mm wire mesh cut with snips and glued in place with dabs of super glue. You can buy this from pet shops or builders’ merchants. Mine comes from some bird feeders I found in a £1 shop. One of the feeders will supply the mesh for all the windows in all six warehouses. Cut it with modelling clippers so that it has flat edges. If you use normal pliers you will be left with lots of little points which will be sharp and painful.
The door frames and window sills are made from more matchsticks cut to size, and stuck on with wood glue. The surround for the main warehouse door is modelling wood, I have this around all the time, there’s no reason you couldn’t use card from a cereal packet though.
Stick the walls to the bases with superglue.
Here’s the ground floor and first floor. There’s a little work to do on the roof section before it can be glued together. The ground floor hasn’t had the drop-in floor added. The drop-in floor has been cut to size and glued in place. As with all the drop in floors, cut a piece the size it ought to be to fill the hole (143mm x 92mm) and then trim a little, about 1mm from a long and a short side. This should let it fit pretty well.
I will be using the cornices I got previously from Litko Aerosystems to detail the front of the roofs for this project.
The top floor and roof are held in position with cork off-cuts at the corners.
Here’s the finished building. The figure is a 28mm figure available from East Riding Miniatures and is shown for scale obviously. The sign is made from balsa off-cuts and the steps are made from the cut-outs from the windows and a scrap of cork for the side wall.
Two of the buildings are going to have sloping roofs. These are made from cereal packet card and two cork triangles braced by a piece of balsa wood.
I’ve added a loading dock to the picture which is the same height as the wharf will be (but narrower). I’ve made a couple of these so I can have some of the warehouses in other parts of the city layout if needs be. I’ll add some steps to the dock later.
A group shot showing the completed roof detail on the sloping roofs.
I’ve made three damaged floors that can be added to any of the buildings at any level to give them a derelict look. One of the stipulations for the contest is that the scenery is 'battle damaged'. I used up the last of the rubble I’d prepared on a separate base made from one of the cut out floor sections, waste not, want not.
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