Hi guys,

With the demise of FW's terrain range (I'd planned to buy up a load of buildings next week when I'm in Nottingham and noticed that the last one has gone from the website today!) I've decided to have a go at building some undamaged buildings using the GW plastic ruins sprues. I believe this is how the FW ones began but I could be wrong about that. Assuming that this goes ok I'm thinking that it might be worth casting some up to make my limited supply of sprues got that little bit further and I'm wondering if someone could give me an idea of how much it'd cost to do that?

I'd guess that the buildings will be of similar sizes to the most common FW ones.

Any tips/ideas before I begin?

With something of that size you're probably best of using a latex mould and casting in plaster, frankly. Using resin in those amounts will be seriously expensive.

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It might be possible to get away with maybe a thin mold. And it might also be less expensive if 'scrap' resin pieces (i.e. wells and feed channels) are used as filler. And foam might possibly work as filler if the walls are poured first.

Speaking hypothetically, of course.

It depends on how you plan to go about things... if you are simply intending to make a few copies of the existing gray plastic parts, then I would say $100. If, however, you intend to cast full buildings, then it'll be more expensive.

I assume you plan to use the gray plastic ruin parts to cobble together a non-ruined facade? If so, it may be a better idea to do that using only the plastic parts (since that will allow you to use plastic cement). Then you can copy the non-ruined facade in resin.

Or, as a 3rd alternative, wait a few month when I get this project moved along...

Thanks for the suggestions. Waiting a month or so is my new favourite   ...

I might still give the building bit of this a go to see what I can come up with ('titan hiding' buildings seem like a useful addition to my FW cityscape). Once I've got my current WH project out of the way (2 weeks) I'll post a thread in the terrain section with what I come up with.

Heya Sem,

The eagle heads look neat, but I'm concerned about their castability.

The chunky FW buildings are rather inefficient in the way I imagine they were moulded and poured; they'd have made for easy moulds to fill and pull, but if you made a mould with a plug (either silicone, part of the mould, or a waxed metal/plastic rod for example) that takes up part of the 'interior' you could make similar blocks, but create hollow castings and reduce the quantity of resin you use a lot.
Sorry if that needs more explanation or a diagram, but I'm knackered and off to bed, hopefully you get what I mean!

Also bear in mind that you could use filler powders to bulk out and further reduce the quantity of resin you use, as the detail will not be as fine as on a 6mm infantryman or a 28mm face etc...

G

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like stormseer said, if you make casts of forgeworld type buildings, make them hollow. fill the center w/ legos or something else that you can pull out when finished.