More Rescued Rubbish

Whenever I have a need to break from painting figures, I have a rummage through the club terrain boxes, find some discarded piece of junk and turn it back in to great terrain. Going in to the darkest recesses of the club stores, I found a bunch of cardboard and balsa models that I was assured were over thirty years old. Most of them looked it but at least one was salvageable.

In its original form it was simply a flocked model with a square of balsa walls. Of course thirty years of daylight had left the flock faded out and balsa form was simplistic. With a handful of terrain scraps and a new base I was able to modify the model enough to give it a more believable shape. I then sanded the new base and painted the lot, flock and all.



With a unit of Parliamentarian foot for scale one can see that the building itself, which needed no real work, is a little small, but the impression is nonetheless right. A 12-15mm scale farm, suitable for battlefields from about 1600 to 1900.

About the same time, one of the members brought in a stockpile of old 20mm Airfix tanks and model railway buildings. After I sent him home with the rare polystyrene tanks that were worth enough to sell on, I rummaged through the box for some useful bits. The result was, with a little rescaling and a lot of repainting, a German munitions factory, suitable for games of Flames of War, or any other 15mm modern setting.



Notably, I used the texture of the hardboard wooden base to my advantage, to give the effect of cobblestones. Rather a small area of the base was textured as grass, and some areas of paving were added. The doors were recalled to suit 15mm models a little more. The German sign is not ‘true’ German, though apparently the language bit of my brain remembered enough to cobble together something that broadly means something factory related!

At nearly a foot square, it makes for a grand little centrepiece to a game, I hope.