So, over on Facebook (nearly a fortnight ago- I need to get better at writing blog posts in a timely fashion!) I saw an offer that was hard to refuse: ten random old TTCombat mdf kits for £16. I ummed and ahhed a bit about whether to take the gamble and sink some of my limited hobby funds into what could potentially be useless to me, but caved when I figured that if I could use two or three of them that was still under a fiver a kit, and hoped that I got some useful buildings.
So, not long after I received roughly five inches of fun (feel free to insert your own joke here):
First off, I was immediately onto a winner, with a building suitable for the zombie project that was worth the price of admission on its own:
As was this clock tower, which could happily see use in the majority of my ongoing projects:
This set with no front page which turns out to be a billboard, which should work for zombies as well as scifi etc:
A ruined Wild West house. Not the most obviously useful for me, but a ruin is a ruin…
Crates! Everyone loves crates!
Another Wild West building. Onto the back burner you go, but I’m sure I can make it into something useable…
I figure if I leave out the actual oil well part of this, it becomes a perfectly serviceable generic tower. Stick a satellite dish on top and you’ve got sci-fi scenery!
Market stalls - great for fantasy, and equally useable for modern games:
The least useful thing, a billion chairs. But on the other hand, I’m sure some of the Rangers of Shadow Deep scenarios are in trashed parts of a convent, so a smattering of smashed up chairs would likely make perfectly good scatter scenery there…
Not immediately useful, but cool nevertheless:
And so I set about building one, having never made an mdf kit before:
YouTube had a variety of handy tips, like slightly raising the sheet on something to pop out the pieces, and spray priming them rather than brushing it on as they will apparently just drink paint.
Then my children wanted to do some painting, which was a perfect opportunity for me to carry on working on my kit! Unusually, I painted it in pieces rather than my usual approach of ‘stick it all together and if you can’t get a brush there you probably can’t see there either’, mostly sponging on colour to try to give the piece some texture:
Then it was a case of assembling it with lashings of glue, and weathering it until it looked like it would fit on my tabletop:
I decided against glueing down the roof piece, so that if need be I can stash loot tokens up there, use it as a sniper nest etc…
£16! What a bargain!
ReplyDeleteThat's a lot of kit for the money. As for the kits soaking up paint seal them with watered down PVA (50/50 mix) and paint will have no problem.
ReplyDeleteNice work! I've built two of these kits: they're fairly simple but they go together pretty well, and you can add bits easily if you want them to be more elaborate. Nice work getting them at such a good price, too!
ReplyDeleteOhh, a nice little treasure! That's a lot of stuff, but also a lot of work ahead! The work on the clock tower is excellent, so I foresee a lot of nice buildings in the future!
ReplyDeleteI actually found Talens acryll paints, the big tubes you find in hobby stores, excellent to prime MDF with. It's slightly thicker consistency, and the fact it is made for "2D painting" on wood, canvas, etc makes it highly suitable.
ReplyDeleteSixteen quid? You can't go wrong for that money! I've found that using textured spray paint works well on MDF kits and adding extra bits, such as AC vents and pipes gives them a really realistic look.
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