I ordered three more Battle Flag buildings for Calamity at the end of December and I finally found some time to get them together. I really thought the detail on the first three that I built was really good (Saloon, General Store and Photographer's Studio), but the detail on these goes a notch higher. The window treatments on all three really stand out. They are all constructed from layering up 2 pieces of 1mm MDF to increase the level of detail. This applies to the shutters on the Gunsmith and Sheriff's office and the windows and front door on Undertaker's place. In fact the front door on the Undertaker's Building is layered up from three pieces of 1mm MDF. I really love this attention to detail. That's why I'll be making sure that the Battle Flag buildings will be the center of attention in Calamity. My concept for what I want the town of Calamity to be has grown from a simple gaming board to very much a display board. I still intend it to use it for gaming but I'm going to strive to bring the level of detail up way beyond your average convention game. I just hope my grand plans don't exceed my abilities.
Back to the Battle Flag buildings! Each building had its own dedicated instruction book and overall these are really good. I think some additional pictures for building the stairs for the Undertaker's building would help as I struggled with these just a little bit. Some larger pictures would be good too, my eyes are getting old! I didn't really have any problems with the way the pieces fit together although I would still recommend drying fitting everything together at least once to be sure you glue it together correctly the first time. I also experimented with gluing the walls together first and then fitting them to the base rather than following the instructions in the booklets. Overall this worked well for the Gunsmiths building, it worked okay for the Sheriff's office (the difficulty here is working around the odd shape of the building, and it worked pretty good on the Undertaker's place as well. It does feel like you need a third hand trying to do it this way though. If you have a couple of buildings to work on you might try it both ways to see how it works for you. The threaded clamp that I have fit on all three Battle Flag buildings and that went a long way in making my method work. (I purchased that clamp from
Micro-Mark.)I have cut down the number of construction pictures, if you really need to see how I clamp things together then you can check out my previous posts about the first three Battle Flag kits I built. You may notice that I acquired two more of the 2x3 blocks. Micro-Mark has been out of these for a while now but I found another source for them. These two are more precision than the first two and come with their own case as well as the bolts and hex nut wrench to actually screw them together.
I'll start off with the Gunsmith's Building. I decided on this building because of the shutters for the windows, I don't have any buildings with this feature and I wanted something that was a little different from everything else I have done.
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| Building in a Bag |
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| The instruction book with an inadvertent shadow of me | |
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| Three of the parts sheet, the 1mm MDF sheet is off to the side. |
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| Sub Assemblies ready to be glued together. |
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| A close up of the window frames with shutters. |
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| Sub Assemblies all finished. Sign is not glued on. |
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| Trying out the corner clamp. Works good! |
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| Gluing the structure to the base |
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| Add some weight to the floor while the glue dries. |
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| Back on the home workbench with real light! |
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| And our favorite huckster giving some sense of scale and style! |
Now on to the Sheriff's Office. Calamity will have both a Sheriff (local and elected by the residents) and a Marshal (Federal). I wanted the Sheriff's office because of the interesting shape of the building and, well, I need one. I haven't decided if Calamity's Sheriff will be a good guy or a bad guy yet.
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| The instruction book for the Sheriff's Office |
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| And a look at the parts |
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| Some of the sub assemblies |
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| Walls are glued up and the floor is being weighted down. |
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| The Front side without the porch roof |
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| The back with a good look at the exterior of the jail cells. |
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| The interior, check out the detail on the cell doors! |
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| With the porch roof in place. |
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| And our huckster staying out of the sun. At least she's not in the cell block! |
And with that we move on to the Undertaker's place. I'm probably not going to use this for the undertaker its just way to fancy for such a dower individual. I'll see how things work out as the history of Calamity gets fleshed out.
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| The Instruction book. Again I dedicated book my favorite kind! |
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| All the parts, there are a lot. I have already assembled the front door and the windows |
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| Sub Assemblies, note that only the front window and door are layered. All the rest are one piece. I do wish that the top left window on the back was placed a little further to the right. I'll have to cut my trim board to get it to fit. |
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| Applying a little weight to get the walls to set right on the base |
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| And a shot from the other side, the front board walk is being weighted down by a 1x2x3 block |
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| Its a long first step from that door on the second floor right now. |
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| Gluing up the stairs |
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| There is a landing now but its still a long first step |
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| This looks a little safer now! |
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| Checking out the line of sight! |
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| Interior supports for the second floor. |
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| And a scale shot. I really need to fix her base. |
That wraps up the Battle Flag construction project. The Battle Flag buildings are a bit more expensive than some of the other ones out there but I think they are certainly worth the money.
