Construction Codes

We’ve been working for a while on a set of 15mm sci-fi building components for scratchbuilders. The 15mm SF community seems to be a very creative bunch of people who come up with lots of clever items of scenery from all sorts of bits and pieces, and we thought that a set of building parts would help towards this.

Rather than separate doors and windows, we’ve created a set of frontages, all around 70-80mm long, made up of a variety of doors and windows cast as one piece. This means that to create a simple building, you just need to stick one of these pieces to the side of a small box or piece of packaging, and there you have a basic house. If you need more flexibility, it’s a simple matter to score along the lines between each section and snap them apart to separate the individual doors and windows.

The range also includes an all-important set of roof vents for ventilation, along with larger industrial and hangar doors, chimneys, balconies and awnings.

For many of these buildings we’ve used UK-pattern surface mount pattress boxes – these are the plastic boxes that electrical sockets are fixed to. A single box will make a simple house, you can stack them to make a small apartment block or there are double-depth boxes that can be used for garages or workshops. These are a couple of pounds from DIY stores, but if bought in bulk from specialist trade counters (eg Screwfix or Toolstation) they can be as cheap as 50p each. Random bits of plastic or polystyrene packing also make a good basis for a building, or vac-formed blister packaging also works. A further option is to use them to dress up commercial vacform plastic buildings (Amera Mouldings have several North African buildings) or MDF ones (I have a couple of Middle-Eastern buildings from Blotz that I’ll be looking at in the near future). Just use your imagination – I have a pair of hangars I made from a salad crisper box that came with an old fridge!

B15-901 – Frontages (x5) – £3.00
B15-902 – Balconies (x2) – £2.50
B15-903 – Industrial Doors (x2) – £2.00
B15-904 – Roof Vents (x3) – £1.50
B15-905 – Chimneys (x2) – £3.00
B15-906 – Awnings (x3) – £1.75
B15-907 – Porch and Window (x2) – £2.50
B15-908 – Hangar Door – £1.50

The components are all resin castings. We’re hoping to post some blog articles over the coming weeks about making various buildings from our selection of components, to show what can be done with them.