Bienvenido to Golfonseca!

Presedente for life Somoza would like to welcome you to the  beautiful República de Golfonseca, located on the Golfo de Fonseca between Honduras and Nicaragua. My people love our Yankee brothers and we encourage you to bring your business here, where with the right government sponsorship, our peasants citizens are dying happy to provide your factories with inexpensive labor.

Here is one of our model villages, the lovely San Cristóbal:

Aerial view from one of our helpful Guardia Nacional  helicopters

Main Street

Another view of the main street

 It offers all the comforts an American investor would want:

A modern service station

Its own department store

A full service grocery store


We already have one bustling business in town, a premier cigar warehouse:

Now many people may try to tell you that Golfonseca is not safe, that those communist dogs the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN) will soon control this country. 

It is all lies I tell you!  My people love me, and the Guardia Nacional ensure that there is always peace with their torturous human rights respecting ways.

___________________________________________________________________________

I have been interested in the Cold War battles that raged across the Third World since I was a youth in the 1980's.  Though the AK 47 Republic rules were written for African conflicts, I grew up watching Under Fire, Romero, and Salvador, and really desired to recreate something of the horrors of that time and region in my Imagination of Golfonseca.

I actually started this project last spring. At this time I only have a few of the miniatures painted (figures are currently from Peter Pig and Battlefront) and have instead focused on the buildings.  For this layout, I predominately used buildings from Monday Knight Productions (retextured to give the stucco a smoother finish to match the other buildings), Timecast, and Gamecraft (textured with Liquitex ceramic stucco and finished with model railroad bits, primarily from Grandt Line). I also picked up a Walthers lumber company that was cut down to create the cigar warehouse. 

The trees are produced by Woodland Scenics.  Roads were made from tool chest liners purchased at the local DIY store.

For the paint schemes, I was inspired by these photos taken in the Nicaraguan town of Rivas.  The signs on the buildings are actual advertising and political posters from the region that I found using Google image search.

Once I make some more progress on my VBCW project, I'll be returning to Golfonseca.  Until then, please be patient.

BUF Thugs

A few local facists have crawled out in support of the British Union.  Figures from Artizan.

New High Street Shopfronts

Here are two more shops from scalescenes.com, kit T005 (please excuse the slight fish eye quality of the photos - my wife has the camera with the close-up setting):

These buildings were previously seen under construction here on my blog.  They show the additional two facade types that come with the kit.  The building on the left is also available in white painted brick. As with all the buildings in this kit, they are half depth.

The first shop interior is Sue's Cafe:

This is a default shop that comes with the kit.  I had hoped to add more seating, but this is all that would fit inside.  To get the table placed right next to the window, I inserted the pre-built shopfront (without the window layer glued on to the frame), placed the furniture through the opening, then glued on the plastic window with the paper decorative framing. The shop front didn't fill the the entire space on the facade between the downspouts, so I had to paint some bricks on the wall card prior to gluing to avoid white gaps.

Next up is my Doctor Who inspired clock shop:

I used one of the blank signs available in the kit, adjusting the font and color with Adobe Acrobat software. This storefront was much easier to assemble than the one with the recessed door.

Vickers Medium Mk. II Tank

Fresh off the work table (and still waiting for a coat of matt varnish) is a Vickers Medium Mk. II tank for my VBCW armies:

This is a 1/55 resin kit produced by Copplestone Castings. It comes without instructions (or decals), but assembly was easy to figure out after looking at photo references. It is fairly detailed (though not completely accurate in dimensions) and well designed.  However, I cannot say the same about the casting quality.

When I opened the kit, I found the decks above the treads were warped, and had to spend some time heating the resin in water and carefully trying to bend them back into position.  The kit also suffered from some large bubble holes in very obvious spots that were tricky to fill.  If you look at the rear of the tank in the photo above, you can see a prime example in the bottom of the curved feature behind the side machine gun.

Another issue I have with the kit is the treads.  Rather than make a left and right tread, they have created a universal piece that can be used on either side. While in theory this is fine, is results in really poor casting.  The treads had a lot of pitting and flash under the tread edges that could not be easily removed without risk of breaking the thin tread edges. They also made the fill point for the tread molds the rear of the treads,  resulting in an oddly appearing flat spot with lack of tread detail as you can see in the two photos above.

Here is the Mk. II next to an Artizan figure and a Lanchester armoured car, also produced by Copplestone.  While no giant, it is a reasonably sized piece.

Overall I think the Medium Mk. II is a fun looking tank and I'm glad someone was willing to produce it for gaming table. And while I think I ended up with with a reasonable model, the casting quality really lets the kit down and I'm not sure I'd buy any more of them unless that was resolved.

My British Buildings

I've had a few requests to reveal where the buildings came from that have been seen in the background of some of my VBCW and Doctor Who photos.  These are paper railway models produced by scalescenes.com. 

I don't usually like paper buildings for the sturdiness issue, but there didn't seem to be much out there in the way of British buildings for 28mm figures.  Plus, I wanted to have enough buildings for some urban fighting, and I'd go broke trying to buy it all in resin.  I happened to stumble across the scalescenes site, and since they had a free trial warehouse facade available for download (pictured below), I thought I'd try it out.

Note:  The kit didn't come with a back wall, so I cheated with a section of cobblestone street and added some resin boxes

Now the largest size produced is in OO gauge (1/76), but since you buy these as downloadable PDFs from the website, you have the ability to scale up during printing.  Being in the US, the largest size paper I could fit into a standard copier/printer was 11"x17" (28cm x 43cm).  With this I was able to go up to 120%  (1/63) before I started getting alerts that the image was exceeding the paper size. (After printing, I saw there was a bit of white border around the edges, so I might have been able to push it further.  However, by that stage I didn't want to pay for reprints).  With larger European paper, you may be able to get closer to the 138% needed for 28mm figures.

Thant being said, the buildings don't look too bad even for being undersized:

At 120%, door sizes run about 30-32mm, which is just under the height of these Artizan figures.  The thicker bases magnify this a bit more, but when they are off the sidewalk, it is less pronounced.  Based on my initial warehouse assessment, I decided to take the plunge and order more kits.

Most kits come in a few texture finishes (you usually get one texture per purchased PDF), but they come with a variety of finishing details so that no two buildings have to look alike.  The details cover buildings from the start of the 20th Century up until the modern era. 

Various shop signs and interiors

Door variants, along with curtains and interior details

Most of the kits come with about15-30 pages, though some of these are for variant items and may not be used for your individual build.  Depending on the kit, they will either be full buildings or facades that are about 3.5cm deep (I'm using the later on the table edges).  Luckily, the company provides you with fairly decent directions for assembly.

Directions

 

My major worry about the sturdiness of the kits (I have small children in the apartment) turned out to be unfounded.  The paper sheets need to be glued on to various thicknesses of card stock for assembly.  For the light card stock (usually architectural details), I am using manila folders.  Medium and thick card stock proved harder to find, so I got some art board that runs about 1.5mm thick (these were doubled up when thick card was required).  By the time you've assembled your building, many of the main structural elements will be 3-8mm thick.

Low relief shop under construction. Floors and interior details can be altered. The vintage advertising on the side was added from images that come with the kit.



The back of the above model, giving you some indication of the layers of 1.5mm art board used during assembly.

 With the introduction out of the way, let's take a look at a couple of the kits.

First up is TO22, Small Terraced Houses:

Fronts

Backs

 In these builds, I used additional building textures from add on kit T022a, and I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that the shop fronts from kit T023 could also be fitted to these homes.  The chimney stacks were made out of small drinking straws, but I found these to break easily and switched to plastic tubing on my later buildings.

Next up is kit T005, Low Relief High Street:

Three of the five fronts in the kit

As you can see, these are half buildings

Close up of the shop details - the kit even came with the newspapers to put on the table

The kit even gives you a few blank signs where you can type in a custom shop name.  If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can further adjust the fonts and font colors of the signs.  For this shop, I've named it after my grandfather, who taught woodworking.

This kit gives you quite a bit a variety with which to work.  There are five different facades, two of which give you two different brick/stone textures to choose from. For the lower shops, there are two large and two smalls styles, available in a few different colors, complete with fixtures.  You also have about 30 shop signs from various eras to select from, along with advertising.  Since I started building this kit, scalescenes has released kit T005a, which is the back sides of these shops.  From the website, it appears this second kit can be combined with the first to form complete buildings.

 The kits were fun to build, but quite a bit of work.  I used a medium hobby blade (you will burn through a lot) and metal ruler for cutting, so hand fatigue became a problem after a while.  With manual cutting I also had trouble keeping the blade perpendicular, so ended up with unintentional angles on my pieces that required trimming for a decent fit (I cannot recommend dry fitting pieces prior to gluing highly enough).  Luckily, you glue a lot of the textures to the card after cutting, so that helped hide some of my errors.  If you have the budget and storage space, it may be worth investing in a mat board cutter jig for these kits.

Another thing that you'll have to watch out for is that, depending on the thickness of your card stock, your pieces may be thicker than what is is allowed for on the printed images.  A common example I ran into was with the interior floors; using the guides in the building, the sides of the floor sections were sometimes visible behind the windows below (luckily the board was white, and I had white window frames, so t wasn't completely obvious).  Again, dry fit before gluing.  Also, be sure to have a fair amount of clamps to hold things together while they dry and some touch up paint.

Overall, I have very happy with the kits, but they do have their pros and cons:

Pros:

• Not too expensive
• High quality images/textures
• Can get a good variety of buildings
• Fairly sturdy

Cons:

• Couldn't quite print them large enough for 28mm figures (may not be a problem for others)
• Take a long time to build and cutting is fatiguing for your hands (and hobby blades)
• No easy way to make them so that figures can be placed in the buildings

I still have a stack more to build, so will add those to the blog when they are complete.