…wheels…

 Next in my trio of posts comes this pair of carts:

When thinking what pieces of scatter terrain that I’d like to build that could see use in games like Rangers of Shadow Deep and Mordheim, an abandoned cart seemed like an easy win - plus, leaving it freestanding rather than based, it could always be flipped over and made part of a barricade.

First of all, I started thinking about wheels:

I grabbed a variety of circles to eyeball to see what felt right - in an ideal world I’d probably have just used the Warhammer cart wheel, but I only have two of them in my bits box and might need them if I ever get round to building the chariot they came from! After some deliberation, the Warhammer wheel won out as being the size to use, so I set about making some wheels out of balsa:

Lots of careful cuts later, I had vaguely round wheels:

I then sanded them in pairs, to ensure that they’d both be matching in their near roundness:

Using balsa, I was able to scribe some wood detail into my wheels using a pencil:

I went a little too deep on one of the grooves and accidentally snapped the wheel, but was thankfully able to glue it back together in such a way that you wouldn’t notice!

Next came… cladding? Shoeing? Whatever the technical term is for adding the metal rim:

I cut a thin strip of plasticard the width of my wheel, and then curled it like it was a ribbon:

I glued it on with superglue for a speedy hold, and then carefully trimmed it to the right length so as not to have an unsightly bump.

Wheels done, I needed to make a body for the cart, so I turned to my trusty distressed sticks

Matchsticks provided a crossbar for strength and some arms to pull it (if anything this post is revealing to the world that I do not know any of the correct terms for talking about carts)

Whilst working on this, I had made up a balsa rectangle that I was considering using as a template or base for my wooden stirrers, and suddenly realised that it wouldn’t actually be that much effort to just make a whole second cart…

A cocktail stick made an ideal axle, so I drilled through the wheels with my pin vice and set about glueing everything together:

And lo, we have the finished carts!

Seen here with a mini for scale:

Then it was really just a case of drybrush, drybrush, and drybrush some more, and thus we have the finished product that you see here, displaying that they are also the right size to carry some of the food supplies from Bad Squiddo and Zealot Miniatures that are currently on my painting tile:

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens

Next time - mystery third post!