| The day was warm and pleasent when the package arrived - it was the hexagonal tower mold! I had been waiting for this mold to arrive since day 1 of joining the Hirst Arts ranks.
I had wanted to create a bunker which would allow my sci-fi force to face down the shameless enemies who invaded their sovern ground.
It was not to be until I had the proper hexagonal parts to build the bunker that I wanted to make. When the day had come, the only thing on my mind was to make the Bastion! I had made several castings of the mold before toying with the idea. It took several tries to come up with a floor plan that would work.
This floor plan allowed for a reasonably sized building with little in the way of structural difficulties (more on that later). So a had begun to cast more pieces, then more, and well, you know - more. This bastion used every single stone I had cast, and then some to complete.
| So I moved onto the building stage. I started by cutting hardboard to the proper size and laying out the center and measuring out the sides and such. I had then begun to place the outer stones with PVA (Elmer's) glue while using the floor tiles as a guide. I worked quickly to be sure that the blocks would fit properly on the base before gluing any of the floor tiles down. Once I was cure the walls fit correctly. I quickly glued the floor tiles into place to be sure to align the walls correctly.
|
|
I had used the single part, hex floor tile, mold that I had created to form the floor tiles all around the bastion as well as the roof sections. I had also used several pieces from the original dungeon builder plans Bruce had posted for the roof supports.
|
|
| A number of questions arose in my head as I had begun to build the structure. I basically had everything drawn out on graph paper before hand, but there were still a few details that I was unsure of since I could only build very little without gluing it all before hand.
|
|
| So I managed to get the bottom section of the building finished and had begun making the upper floor/roof.
|
|
| The central tower was an integral part of the design, and so making it fit into the center made for some tricky construction - mainly in the form of access from the tower to the roof areas. As I looked at it, the only possible way was to grant access through doorways which would later have doors blocking them. So the tower came into being as a seperate piece to be glued onto the roof sections later. As it turns out, the crenelations on all sides prevented the roof from coming off cleanly, so I had to seperate two sides of the roof and glue them into position while the cross piece with the tower connected would be removable.
|
|
|
|
|
Allowing access to the roof of the central tower was also important, so I had only left out one floor tile and the tower was completed.
Originally, I had wanted to install a winding staircase up the center column that supported the roof section, but by doing this, there would be no access to the sides of the lower level (some of us like to put the figures inside when gaming), so the stairway will have to be a wooden ladder or imagined right now. An access hole would have also been nice in the base of the central tower, however, because of the placement of the supports below, the access hole would be directly under an arrow slit or in a doorway, so it too was washed from the plan. However, the roof access hole was installed and is accessable with a ladder.
|
|
| Now that the piece is completed, I only wish I had made it larger so that the overall proportions would be more realistic. However, it is still a fairly large piece and quite heavy. The entire structure weighs in at a whopping 13 pounds and a large majority if because of the weight of the Vatican stone versus plaster.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Voidgamers Home :: Hirst Arts Terrain Building
