SF Desert Township

I’ve started out on a project to build a 15mm township from our desert buildings range (we finally have enough spare castings to let me do this – we’ve been selling them as fast as Phil makes them !). At Maidstone Wargames Society we seem to have settled on a near-future, terraformed Mars as the setting for our 6mm/15mm/starship games, using the Modified Mars site as a guide.

I haven’t named my little township yet – since I’ve been fielding German ONESS forces in our two campaigns so far, I’ll probably stick to that and come up with a suitably Germanic moniker for it.

Having picked out the models I needed (one of each of the ten models that we make, with duplicates of the three smallest houses) I ran the bottom of each model over a sheet of coarse glasspaper to smooth it off and flatten any irregularities (do this in a ventilated place, preferably outdoors, and don’t breath in any of the resulting dust – wear a mask if necessary).

The next stage, as with all resin models, is to give them a good wash in soap and water – washing-up liquid (dish soap) is fine – this removes the dust from the previous sanding, and also cleans off any residues from the casting process. I just chucked the lot in the washing-up bowl with lots of hot soapy water and gave them a scrub with an old brush, then sat them on some newspaper to dry off.

I’ll try to give a blow-by-blow breakdown of the whole process of making the township, including painting, basing, detailing etc. I tend to be fairly erratic and have bursts of activity followed by periods of nothing happening, so you might need to be patient …