Monday, August 28, 2006

Castle Model

As long time readers of this blog may recall, my youthful miniature wargamer bug was revived when I helped my stepdaughter construct a castle model for a school project. We were both very proud that our castle received the best mark the teacher had given for this standard project in nearly 30 years. It was a quite imposing castle.
...
Her teacher gave her a list of features (eg. Keep, chapel, curtain wall, portcullis) to include in her model, and we then built a design around these requirements. The stars visible on the board connected these features on the model to the legend (white section near the drawbridge).


The model took about 20 person hours to create from our plans, its scale can be seen from the pen lying alongside the rear wall (above). A surprising comment from her teacher was that we had built it close to scale (which we had). We used about $20 of materials plus paint. We made it from balsa wood, on a cloth covered wooden base. Here's an aerial view...

We recently had to move house, and I have deconstructed our castle to its component bits. Before I did so, I took these photos. It had already suffered damage over the last 18 months, it now lies in wait in pieces for a medieval army to form and fight over its battlements.

6 comments:

MaksimSmelchak said...

Hi AG,

Great blog you have here!

I went ahead and linked to you from my blog.

Keep up the good work!

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.

Adelaide Gamer said...

Thanks. I enjoy your blog also. Only thing I'd suggest, why not keep your family and gaming stuff on separate blogs. It's no more work, it's all free, and it allows folk to pick and choose...

I wish I could work out how to link to others on the sidebar, the only times I've tried it's not worked. Maybe I'll try again...

Secundus said...

Great castle, Is it 15mm scale? I love getting the bolser wood and card out and getting creative, I made a roman watch tower along while ago now and so I think the time is right to make something new.I'm trying to get a Roman campaign off the ground at the moment and I'm sure there will be plenty of things to construct for that when it takes off. Great stuff, keep it up.

Adelaide Gamer said...

It wasn't built to a scale for figures, although it would be useable for the micro scales, it's probably around 1:350. We worked out what was the largest base allowable, and then designed it around that.

I have some old 15mm republican romans, and a few medieval knights in that scale, and they would get stuck in the portcullis.

I would like one day to build a high definition scale model of medieval castle plus village, not for wargaming necessarily but for fun.

A roman harbour would be cool to build.

Balsa is great to work with, much more satisfying than card and plastic. You can see some of my spanish building attempts on earlier posts on this blog. They would fit in any era (at 6mm, 10mm at a stretch).

Pinoy Wargamer said...

That is simply awesome, man!

You made it out of balsa wood? I wish I had the right tools to make terrain like that. Wood makes for sturdy gaming pieces ^_^

Adelaide Gamer said...

Nice to hear from you again shink1m. The principles of construction behind this castle would go down well in your little worlds...

The toolkit for this was a metal ruler, paper (for plans), 6B lead pencil, craft knife (cheap variety), wood glue (for gluing fabric to baseboard), 'superglue' (for construction). If I was to buy it all new and avoid expensive brandnames, the toolkit (including glue) would be about $15 Australian. Which is less than the balsa...