Cardboard buildings from Metcalfe

The Metcalfe Factory situated in Oosterbeek just before a lot of paras appear.

My pals Koen, Thomas and Daniel staged a participation game of Chain of Command at Smashcon the other week. I was fully occupied with gaming with my son David during that day (and with daughter Johanna the next) so the only thing I did for that game was to bring some houses, among them a cardboard factory I made several years ago.

Another view of Oosterbeek

That got me thinking of those unbuilt kits from Metcalfe that were hidden in the bottom of my mini-mountain of terrain-pieces.

The rest of the Factory

I got the remaining building from the 00/H0 Small Factory box and also 00 Water Tower and Sand House. They are really excellent stuff, easy and fast to build.

Sand House

I will probably use pigments to dirty them up a bit, but I prefer to do that outside as it is rather messy and we’ve just got a lot of snow here so that will have to wait.

Water Tower

Pyramid from Amera

I’ve bought some Amera pieces for my Frostgrave gameboard and this one, F232 Pyramid, is the first one finished.

Amera produces vacuum-formed white polystyrene terrain pieces and have everything from fantasy to SF in scales from 1/600 to 1/35.

The pyramid started out as a plain pyramid but I had other plans for it. 

For Halloween I bought a bag of skulls with the intention of boosting some terrain-pieces with it and the pyramid was perfect for that. 

I cut the skulls into suitable forms, glued them in place and finally green-stuffed all cracks.

For the ground around the pyramid I had these OO scale self adhesive stone paving slabs from Metcalfe and I glued them to the base with white glue to be sure it held.

Everything painted in the same style as the rest of my other Frostgrave buildings. To have at least some colour on the table I had the sides of the pyramids in antique red and drybrushed them heavily with the base colours to get a really worn look.

Another piece ready for Frostgrave.

Enough with these cultist! 

20mm Factory from Metcalfe

This weekend we have another participation game going on Incognicon. It will be eastern front 1942 and based on the scenario “Nice one Kirill” from Too Fat Lardies' Summer Special 2007.

We need a factory, the Collective Cabbage Processing Plant, and had nothing really appropriate in the collections. But I had a cardboard kit from the excellent company Metcalfe just waiting to be built.

Building is easy, and I made a couple of factory-buildings a year ago, if you want some thoughts on how to build them.

Factory before it met my pigments

Nice enough as it is, but this being the worker’s paradise I wanted it to look a bit worn. How to do? Well, I have bought far too much pigments (not possible, I know) and this was an excellent project to try them out.

Now it looks more lived in. I think I’ll let the other kits have a go with the pigments also, really improves it.

Cardboard-buildings - Brewery

Now, this doesn’t sound at all exciting, but the results are better than expected.
A year ago or so I bought a couple of card-building from Metcalfe, and they turned out to be perfect additions to the small town of Les Attaques in the France 1940 participation game we played at Stockholms Spelkonvent.
I have bought a couple of factory buildings, that will be used in France 1940 and -44, and Germany 1945.
I started with this one, a brewery.

The kit comes as rather thick ready cut card, where you free the individual parts with a few short cuts with a sharp knife.

Then you use your white glue to glue it all card together, and I glue the ‘windows’ with super-glue gel (Loctite Super Attack Flex Gel).

Finished in a couple of evenings, and an outstanding result. Highly recommended!

I’ve got a couple of more sets to be finished soon.