Shoe's 30 for 30, day 12: guard tower

Today's build is a weird one.  I wanted to construct a mostly brick-built structure so I picked a thing that would be difficult any other way:  a round guard tower.  This tower is about two and a half stories with arrow slits at cardinal directions.  The playable space is unfortunately only the roof which will comfortably fit a few normal sized figures.  Also note that blogger refused to upload a bunch of my pictures for...reasons, so there aren't as many WIPs in here as I'd like. 

I milled bricks on the Proxxon at roughly 0.25"x0.25"x0.5" to be at better scale with 28mm figures.  I unfortunately ended up with some off cuts in the mix which usually adds some useful chaos but in this case it was a serious complication.  If you look closely at the brickwork you can see where different height bricks made a mess of the structure's consistency.  These bricks were textured by sticking them in a container with a bunch of jaggedy heavy things like BMC suggests.  In my case it's a bunch of very hard rocks and bunch of small bolts. The common wisdom is to make a bunch of bricks, then make a bunch more and when you think you have too many, make a bunch more after that.  So that's what I did.


The first two rows of bricks and only the first two rows were formed around an empty pringles can.  See, I knew I saved those for a good reason.  Every other row up to the collar is slightly tilted back to slightly taper the walls.  This was an experiment to a) see if I could do it and, b) see how hard it would be to do it consistently.  The answers were a) yes, and b) no.  When I started I didn't know how tall I was going to build.  Sometime this afternoon it became clear that it would not be tall but I'd been tapering for a much taller tower.  So that didn't really work out. 

Most bricks are affixed with hot glue.  One row (the one at the corner of the shaping) is attached with PVA.  If I had it to do again and didn't have a time constraint, I'd affix it entirely with PVA.  Lots of small fixes to the shaping could have been done since PVA takes longer to dry.  I like the speed with which you can build with hot glue but in this case, in addition to its thickness, it prevented the build from being better.

Now to the worst part:  the terrible, terrible gaps.  If you look close you can probably see where I stuffed foam chips between bricks.  Most of these weren't even glued in.  I thought smaller bricks would mean tighter tolerances but that didn't really play out.  The upper rows do fit better but that's because I beveled each individual brick with a hobby knife.  That really slowed down proceedings even if it looked a lot better.  If I could get the Proxxon to do this for me that would probably be best.

The roof is made of coffee stirrers cut to size with wire cutters and textured with hobby knife gnarling.  The joists are hot glued to the wall at an almost consistent level.  The flooring is then PVAed to the joists as one does. The texturing is a little subtle and is picked up by liquid talent better than mod podge + craft paint.  You can see that action on the front door and the trap door on top. 

Overall the defects don't ruin the structure but it's probably obvious that this one was a learning experience.  The next brick built structure should be better.  Because I was ambitious and painted this one this evening, there'll be something other than painting the tower going on tomorrow.