Saturday, November 17, 2012

Scratchbuilt Buildings - Part 1

These are some old pics of a scratch-build project that I finally got back to working on.

The Goal

Before a bunch of life changing events began to derail my hobby efforts, I embarked upon a goal to create some scratch-built 1:56 scale (28 MM) terrain.  The idea was to save money and to do something creative.  I have long been inspired by DIY blogs such as Matakashi' Tea House and I wanted to try my own hand.

So, I set out to create four buildings that could be used for the suburbs within the 1920-1940-ish period so that I could apply them to Pulp, Interwar, and the Mythos genres. It would be a first step to bigger projects which would include urban buildings and eventually rural ones as well.

These buildings shown here were first designed on a sheet of graph paper.  I used foam-core, pink styrene, and card-stock paper.  A hot-glue gun was used to keep things in place. The buildings have a foundation with a removable frame and a board is glued upon the foundation to stabilize the styrene and act as a flooring surface.  This allows me nearly double the real-estate because I could have a layout where there are foundations placed separate from the frames themselves.  Of course, I'd need to create some ruined frames to make the foundations convincing. 

These images are from 2010-12-21.  I've got some new ones that I'll post in a few days.
Back of Small Building A.

Front of Small Building A.

Small Building B.  It has a deck area.

Large Building A, interior.

Example of the removable frame and the foundation.

8 comments:

  1. I like what you have done! M's Tea Room has had some good info there, I am jus shy about making the leap, I keep hoping to find some good templates as I am afraid I will make it too small or large in the end.

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  2. @Brummie; thanks! if things go well I should have Part 2 up in a few hours.

    @styx; yes, I actually purchased several square feet of cork-board as a result of Matakashi. I intend to make the same sort of brownstones that he demonstrates there in.

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  3. Shaping up nicely. Useful designs.

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  4. That looks great! Im just building some buildings for the same period and yours are a great inspiration. I like the stonework on the bottom, really clever!

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  5. @A J; I'll try and see if I can find my original sketches and get a manifest of parts.

    @Mathyoo; Aggro got me started on this! And thanks! =)

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  6. Looking good Robert! Did you save your templates?

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  7. @aggro84; thanks! You've been inspiring me with those huge red-stone buildings for too many years.

    As for what I've got; I did find some older designs in electronic form, but those were when I thinking much bigger - like in designing enough for a township. I can't find my napkin sketches for these design here so I'll try to get them collected into a single document when I've got more time.

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