Thursday, June 1, 2017

Further Progress on the 28mm Starfort

    OK, for once I turned down overtime at work and had a whole glorious day with nearly nothing to do with myself. Shunning the magnificent sunshine I descended into the depths of the Anton's Wargames Workshop to address unfinished project pile. Looming (literally) over the rest of my many "in-progress" efforts was the vast blue bulk of the starfort. I grinned and set to work, below you can see the fruits of my efforts.

the rough-cut bastions,these are slightly wider than the prototype,
 apparently math DOES matter


pieces for the corner walls, these were cut to stack interlaced with each other
 like the logs in a log-cabin (or Legos for those with children)

the off-cuts, weirdly useful-looking, 
I will have to find something to do with that heap soon

the finished bastions, looking strangely like a row Victorian battleship prows

the fort laid out on the workshop floor
the blue ruler on the bastion is one English foot
the ant-like things on the wall are a 28mm cannon and crew

a slightly smaller version with the added wall section removed

     Of course there are a thousand things left to do but I now have an understanding of the size of the project that I have set myself. Next I have to fabricate a couple of dozen yards of parapet and knock together guard towers for the corners, then cut a good many gunports in the parapet. I think I will be busy most of the summer.

3 comments:

  1. Impressive architecture there! How do you get such a neat edge to the sections?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm guessing you are using a wire cutting tool and that you've practiced a fair bit with it to get those crisp edges - and some judicious use of sandpaper. YEs?

    ReplyDelete
  3. J Jackaman, The tool that makes all this possible is the Proxxon hot wire cutter. It is like a small jigsaw/table saw but has a wire instead of a blade. There is a moveable fence that will guide the work past the wire allowing long straight cuts. The rough cut sections were done freehand then run through the tool again with the fence in place. With practice I have learned how to remove sections as thin as 1/16th of an inch. Once the trim cuts were made I glued the pieces together into the three-high layer cake sub-assemblies and ran them through the tool one more time to get a finished edge that matched on the whole piece. I should probably do a step-by-step posting when I build the ravelin.

    ReplyDelete