Review - Battle Flag - 28mm Western Buildings - The Saloon

Tonight I took the General Store that I built last night and tried out my razor saw on it. I use the razor saw on plastic and wood pieces to create a deeper grain pattern and to roughen up smooth surfaces. Well it doesn't do much on MDF except create some fuzz. I'm may have the distressing step except that my paint work on this kind of depends on it. I tried just scoring the boards with the x-acto knife and I got more of a pattern but still managed to generate a bunch of fuzz. I'll have to mull over this technique. Without doing something the walls are just so smooth to represent weathered boards. This will probably only bother me.

Tonight I cracked open the Saloon. I picked this one because the assembly was basically the same as the General Store (its uses the same directions) and because I was able to avoid making the same mistakes I made on the General Store. This second building went together much easier, its a simpler design so there is not a lot of fussy around with the detail on the facade. Again an excellent little kit, so my opinion on the Battle Flag line continues to be a very good value for the money and I recommend them if you are building a western town, Still waiting for the Sarissa Precision order to arrive. I ordered a livery stable from them that I'm really looking forward to adding to the town of Calamity.

This building came on the frames, I had already punched some stuff out because I needed the frame to fix a mistake I made on the General store. Like most lasercut kits this stuff practically falls off the frames. There are little arrows etch in the scrap portion of the frame showing you were the attachment points to the frame are. I found that quite useful on the more delicate parts as I know exactly where to apply pressure. Nice feature!

Back to the roof. This time I made sure I had the end caps on the correct ends. The flat no detail piece on the end marked front because that sits behind the false front and the detailed end piece on the back. I was a little less clamp happy this time around.

Well that is until I got to building the front, then the clamps were back in force.

Here I'm following the directions and attaching the boardwalk to the front. From an ease of build perspective I think I would leave the boardwalk off until I assemble the whole building. Putting the four walls together without the extension of the boardwalk is a lot easier.

A side wall and the rear wall get their window frames and door frame.

A page from the instructions showing the window/door page as well as laying out the foundation for the boardwalk. On the boardwalk be sure you dry fit the pieces and make sure have them facing the right way. Detail needs to be facing out on the boardwalk and there must be room for two steps on the back of the building which is also notched to accept the backwall. You will be unhappy if you get this wrong and MDF is extremely difficult to pry apart after you have applied glue. You definitely need to get this right the first time. Fortunately I managed to pull off that feat again!

Everything is just about ready for the main "box" assembly. The boardwalk foundation pieces are still clamped down. I remembered to remove the clamps before I tried dry fitting the building together.

So a couple steps beyond the dryfitting. Walls assembled and glued together (you can see some glue I missed cleaning up) and the interior floor supports around in the inside edges are in place. These supports require a little attention because they are notched to fit together at the ends. So again pay attention to how you are putting them in place.

The floating floor is in and being weighted down to dry. Apply your glue to the bottom of the floor where it will rest on the supports. The fit inside the building is so tight that any glue on the edges will get scraped off against the walls when you set the floor in place.

Time for the stairs and the hitching posts.

Popping the roof into place to show off the finished structure.

A few scale shots with my posse of cowboys from Black Scorpion. You can tell these are older because they are in pewter and not resin! Again the Black Scorpion minis are a bit tall on their bases. That cowboy is going to lose his hat when he tries to go inside for a drink.

And now on the growing streets of Calimity. The Saloon and the General Store side by side.

I have one more Battle Flag building to go and hopefully I will get to that tonight. After that one is complete I'll start adding a bit of additional detail that will hopefully hide the interlocking sides a bit more and fix the rear gable of the general store so that its not a blank space. After that I can move on to getting them painted and weathered. Definitely pulling the airbrush out for these monsters!

Review - Battle Flag - 28mm Western Buildings - The General Store

This was a surprise package today as I wasn't expecting anything from Battle Flag to arrive yet. It was a pleasant surprise though. I'm going to be getting Wild West buildings from Battle Flag, Sarissa Precision and Gamecraft Miniatures. Battle Flag has obviously arrived, Sarissa is in transit somewhere and I'm still deciding what would be worthwhile to order from Gamecraft.

Since one of these companies is likely to get the bulk of my building orders after all is said and done I wanted to really sit down and document what's in the box and how well it went together. Since they were the first on the doorstep I'll take a look at Battle Flag's General Store.

Let's start off with the packaging.


















Nothing terribly exciting but nicely presented and I do like to be able to see all the parts. Of course the fun part is getting to spread the parts across your workbench. (Note these did not come with painted 15mm British Napoleonices, those guys just showed up complaining about having unfinished bases).

Now its off to the races. Following the instruction manual (well mostly). The roof is the first component that gets put together. You will notice that I do like my clamps and I highly recommend that you use clamps to assemble the building. I also use Titebond which is a carpenter's glue rather than regular PVA or white glue. My first mistake occurred in building the roof, I thought I read the directions thoroughly but I still managed to do this wrong. You can see what I did wrong at the end.

 Now, they do recommend that you paint your building first, but I'm ignoring that advice because of a couple of things that I want to do. Overall I would agree though painting some of these parts first while they are flat and easy to manage is probably the way to go. The next step involved putting together the front. This is a classic false front building. I made a mistake here as well, and I'm going to sort of hold the instructions accountable at this point, although I still should have figured it out on my own. The front goes together pretty easy. Its a little tricky at the end when you are putting the top piece of the facade together as there is no way to clamp it and you just hope to have your glue dry quickly. I suppose super glue might work here, but you better get the placement right the first time! My mistake clearly shows in the picture too, which means I had a hard time correcting it. When you glue MDF together and clamp it, getting it apart in one piece is almost impossible and I had to construct a replacement for one end of the facade because of it. So dry fit a couple of times and make sure you understand how something is suppose to go together before you apply the glue!

From here I moved onto the sides and rear, adding the door and window frames. I actually got this part of it right the first time. Lining the pieces up can be a bit tricky so just take your time and make sure everything remains neat and square.

Now it was time to work on the base. This building has a raised boardwalk (and hence a raised interior floor as well). I really like this feature and its one of the reasons I was attracted to the Battle Flag kits.

Overall not to difficult to put together. This time I double checked to make sure I had the right parts in the right place!

With that done it was time to move on towards the final assembly, bringing all those walls with inter-locking ends together. The instructions do recommend you dry fit this a couple of times to get a feel for the order you put the pieces together on the base. Basically start with one wall and work in one direction, either clockwise or counter-clockwise, whichever gets you done. I also glued the boardwalk in place and clamped that down to dry. Those are steel weights on the back. They are great for adding weight where I need it and they are dead square so I can use them to glue up walls and keep the corners of the building square. Today they just had to sit there.

Now it was time to put in the interior raised floor. There are some little pieces you add along the walls to raise up the floor. I got this in right the first time as well. I then applied glue to the bottom edge of the floor that would rest on these braces. Do not put glue along the edges! It seems like a good idea until you realize that with the tight fit you are going to scrape all the glue off along your walls and leave a mess to clean up. So only glue on the bottom. I of course add weight to hold it down since I couldn't clamp it.

I followed this up by adding the steps which pretty much completed the model at this point.

The building is complete now and its at this point that I realized I messed up the roof. Pay careful attention to your instructions. Here is a hint, the roof only goes on one way!

And now for a little size comparison. I found some Black Scorpion cowboys in the draw (who would have thought!) so I stuck them on their bases and took some candid shots. I think if they weren't on bases they would look just about right. They feel a little tall in these pictures though.

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From here I'll move on to the finish work. This building as built and if you just paint it straight up is going to look pretty darn new. Well, that's not happening in my Wild West! Tomorrow it has a date with a razor saw.

Now we get to my opinion (for what its worth, and I already have wooden nickles).

Instructions - They aren't awful but they are generic and are designed to cover a couple of different buildings. Although I know it costs more I would have preferred instructions geared specifically to this building. Some finishing instructions would be good too. Since I was able to follow them and get the thing built and looking good - 3 out of 5

Components - Quality wise the components are top notch!. Everything fit together pretty much exactly the way you would expect from a quality laser kit. 5 out of  5

I would recommend this little kit to anyone in need of wild west buildings for their games. It goes together fast (don't forget the clamps!) and really only gave me a bit of trouble. The instructions could be better. I'm disappointed that there is no interior detail on the walls (the floor is nice), especially since there is a back door and its not represented on the inside. I do realize that lasers only cut from one side and its probably not worth the trouble to flip it over and engrave the other side. Battle Flag has to make money at this after all. I would have also liked to see some interior walls though and there weren't any. If I can take the roof off during a game I expect to see a little bit more on the inside. I did ask Battle Front about this and they said that they would have some interior kits available beginning in November. I'm looking forward to that.

 I have two more buildings from Battle Flag to build and I'm looking forward to getting to work on them..

What's on my plate

I'm thinking about making this a regular Friday post, something that will help me keep my projects in order and on track and maybe actually finish one or two of them before the end of the year. A couple of these do have real deadlines so that might help me stay on target. I'm going to sort of list these in a priority order, of course that is subject to change without notice.

1) RPG characters, finish. These are for my every other Saturday game. There are only six of them, you would think this was a slam dunk kind of thing. 1 Female Gnome Battlemage, 1 Male Dwarf Barbarian, 1 Male Dwarf Cleric (NPC, currently being played by someone interested in joining the group), 1 Female Human Rogue, 1 Male Human Cleric and 1 Male Elf Paladin. These only have to be tabletop paint jobs and are likely to see rough use. I would like to have these done for the next game so I have a week at this point.

2) SAGA Norman army, get started. These are the Perry Miniatures which are all prepped and just need to be mounted for painting and primed. I want to enter these in the army painting competition for Genghis Con XXXIV in February of 2013. So they are to get my best efforts. There are 87 miniatures here so I do need to get moving. I think rather than my normal assembly painting style I'm going to paint these up by SAGA points which should let me concentrate on just a small set of figures at a time. So 4 mounted Knights, 8 armored Spearmen, 8 Crossbows, 12 Archers or a single character. For the characters I plan on mounted and dismounted versions of the warlord plus a couple of small character vignettes.

3) SAGA Norman army, repair and touch-up. These are the Gripping Beast Miniatures which make a fine wargame army. Unfortunately some repair is necessary after they were returned to me. I have some new steel lances on the way to replace the cast pewter ones so those will become more survivable (and slight more dangerous to your opponent since they are actually quite sharp). I found some Gripping Beast crossbows to replace the two missing ones and I'm going to take a shot at sculpting a couple of tails to replace the missing ones on the horses (I think there are two missing tables). A little touch-up work after that and this will be an army to be proud of on the battlefield.

4) 15mm British Napoleonics, re-base and paint.  After initially being very enthused about the LaSalle rules my group has kind of soured on them. Although others may disagree they just don't have the right "feel" to them. It has nothing to do with the weird turn sequence either (I have several games I enjoy that have weird turn sequences), its like the armies are just to generic and don't really seem to behave the way you expect them to behave. I can't really explain it better than that. So I'm mounting these up for Napoleon at War. This will let me use them for Napoleon's battles as well. The bases are a bit larger than Napoleon's Battles but pretty close. I have remounted one infantry unit (74th Highlanders, non-kilted) and started another last night (88th Connaught Rangers). These are mounted on six stands of four for a total of 24 figures which means I have 8 figures left over from each LaSalle unit I rebase. I'll have a bunch of extra center company infantry after I'm done so I guess my British infantry force is going to get a significant expansion which means I'll need more command, grenadier and light infantry minis to fill them out. Of the six stands one is grenadier, one is light, one is command (2 flags, an officer and a drummer, this counts as center company) and three center company stands. Each unit also gets two little skirmisher stands. These will be filled out mostly with regular light infantry but I'll do a proportion of them as rifles as well. Hopefully this will be the kickstart I need to actually get the artillery and cavalry done as well.

5) 15mm ACW, finish. I just need to get the union cavalry done for this army. Its never been a high priority since the union side rarely has cavalry and I have some older stuff that can be subbed in.

6) 28mm WWI USMC next unit. This has always been a side project so I'll fill it in a unit at a time as I feel like it. I have everything I need for this army now, including a couple of little FT-17s for support.

7) LoTR Helmingas finish. Originally this was going to be a display/tournament army that would have taken place last month. Unfortunately that tournament was cancelled when the organizer moved to the other side of the state for work. I have almost all the pieces for this one, the infantry component has been started and I think I have most of the cavalry component now. I'm missing two characters Eomer and Erkenbrand to finish off the army. I do intend to finish this army as I enjoy the game. There will probably be re-newed enthusiasm once the Hobbit is released.

8) Legion of the Damned 40K, acquire. This is a truly long term project and again is meant to be more of a display army than anything else. I have slowly been acquiring Legion of the Damned miniatures, both older and newer models to create an army. Now of course its not legal as an army but I'm not letting that stop me since I don't actually intend to play 40K with them. This will be a highly converted army and some of the ideas are still gelling while I acquire the various components (the cheaper the better!).

9) Genghis Con XXXIV entries. Its never to early to start on competition entries. I have all the components for my diorama and construction and painting can commence anytime now. I haven't decided on which individual piece I'll do, but I'm determined to have at least two entries in the competition this year.

10) Danish TYW in progress. Another display army for me, currently no one is playing so I don't feel rushed to get it done. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes on this one, however, I do want to get some work done on it to see my painting style mixes with the oil-wipe technique.

11) ATSF "the Patch" general work. Although construction proceeds at a snails pace it does slowly move forward as I work on rolling stock, motive power and the occasional building. The first priority there is to finish the brick freight house that I started. I found the clerestory windows that I misplaced that I need for the roof so I can get back to construction on that.

I think that's a reasonable accurate list at the moment. Of course its going to change on a whim, as other miniatures surface. I'm pretty sure that I have pirates and cowboys hidden away in drawers that would like to get painted. I'll probably add those to the list after I get my ships from the Laser Dreamworks Kickstarter and I get a look at the buildings from Battle Flag and Sarissa Precision.

So what's on your plate?

The Workroom; The Final Piece (well pieces)

Some where in here there is a post about my workroom. At that point it was pretty darn close to be finished. What was missing were the paint racks and tool drawers that I wanted. I had spent some time searching around and quite frankly as far as tool drawers or racks there is not much out there, at least that appeals to me. I looked at the racks and drawers from Back 2 Base-ix a couple of times, even put together an order and then stopped when I got to the shipping. Back 2 Base-ix is based in Australia and the shipping chargers are really high. I kept looking and kept going back so I decided to make an order even with the shipping charges.

I ordered two of the inner corner paint rack (for Vallejos and Reapers), 2 of the small tidy drawers, 1 center paint rack with two drawers and the larger version of the tidy drawers. They arrived today and I immediately went into construction mode. The word tidy keeps throwing me, I'm not sure if its normal usage in Australia or they are just using it as a descriptor. They won't be "tidy" for long when I start putting things in them.

Although I would have preferred some printed instructions, their online videos are pretty good, although I did pause frequently to catch up. I had the sequence down pat after the first couple of builds and I think I built all 6 components in about 4 hours. Pretty good time I think and I like the engineering that went into these. My only complaint is that the drawers are smaller than I thought they would be and I'm not sure they will actually hold what I want them to hold. That's on me since I didn't translate mm to inches very well. However, the small tidy drawer could stand to be a little bigger.

This is what I ordered (these are the mdf versions and there are no stock numbers)
The Rack: The Drawer Tidy (x2)
The Rack: The Bigger Drawer Tidy
The Rack: 90 degree Internal Corner
The Rack: Straight Section, large, paints (vallejo/reaper) & 2 drawer unit.

I'm still waffling if they are worth the price, mostly because of that huge shipping charge which added another $87 to the price of a $200 order. I think the paint racks are going to be fine, although the drawers in the center paint rack unit are really small and might hold my small files, they will certainly hold bits, so maybe bits drawers is what they will become. So the drawers are all smaller than I expected but the various units still take up a fair amount of space on my workbench!

Here are some pictures of the units and how they are arranged on my desk.

The 90 degree internal corner paint rack

The Small Tidy Drawer

The Large Paint Rack with drawers

The Large Tidy Drawers

How it all fits on the workbench