Terrain: Building a wooden Fort for my FIW toysoldiers - WIP

Manufacturer:   Selfmade

Scale:   1:30 (suitable for 60mm toysoldiers)

Hi,

as I have posted about a finished test section of a wooden fortification about two or three weeks ago I decided to get into this project completely. This will take some time. But after having posted some pictures of this project within the Facebook-Group concerning JohnJenkins figures I got a lot of positive reactions. https://www.facebook.com/groups/333462707235698

So - let´s do it.

As this is WIP there will be several posts about this project. I want to do this in a kind of a tutorial how I made the single sections.

Within this post I will show you a bit of the techniques an tools I am gonna use.

Hope you enjoy it.

Cheers

Mike

First of all I got my styrofoam into shape. The height of the platforms is going to be 9cm with a 0,5cm boardwalk on top. For the corner sections I made a template from cardboard. This will help me to reproduce more corner sections if I would like to expand the fort.

Further I got me some other "test" sections to see if the project would work.

You can see the already painted test section that I had posted a few weeks ago. The unfinished log cabin had been constructed some months ago and within this project I want to finish it aswell.

Next step was to cut another plate of styrofoam into stripes 1x1cm each by using my Proxxon foam cutter.

Now it is time to get the rectangular stripe into a rounded shape.

You have to use the right kind of foam here. There are some types of foam that are not as easy to get into shape by pressing it with your fingers. Believe me - this will get you sore muscles within your fingers.

So I found me a better way. Rolling the stripes is also stressful but not as hard as pressing the stripes with your fingers.

That´s a good result to continue.

A already prepared section. 9,5cm in height, 6cm deep and 20cm in length.

Now cut the rounded stripe to 20cm length...

...and glue it on to the bottom of the wall section,...

...use some pins to fix it,...

...and sink the pins completely into the foam. Later they will look like nails fixing wooden logs.

The section fully planked with logs.

Here comes the next step:  grap a modelling scalpel that´s not too sharp...

...and begin lightly to carve some structure into the foam...

...so that it looks like this. A nice irregular structure looking like the bark of a tree.

Now take another rounded stripe of foam and get the top into shape by using a cutter knife.

Place at least two logs at the ends of the section like this and again fix them with some "nails".

These logs also have to be structured.

Now the other side of the section is planked with vertical logs, that also have been structured and fixed with "nails" by using pins.

Now I used real nails. I had to search for very short nails because for the next step the normal pins would have been too long.

On the inner side of the section I placed two stripes of foam of about 1cm x 0,3cm.
This time I fixed it with the short nails to avoid that the spike would pull out on the other side of the single logs.

So this section is done. And this took me about three hours to do.

Does it fit to the rectangular corner section? I think so. :)

Now I concentrated on the corner section that should representate a kind of Vauban style. First of all I created an entrance into a hidden storage room. 

Then I carved the structure of the walkway into the top of the section.

The result after about one hour.

Again a lot of pins had been used to give the impression of nails.

I also started to plank the second straight section just to look if every log is in its right place after putting the modular sections together.

In my opinion this is a pretty good result.

This also seems to fit pretty well.

My efforts for this first WIP.

What are your thoughts about this?