Christmas approaches and this year we’ll be celebrating at my wife’s family farm. Down there they have a tradition that goes some way towards rejecting the crass commercialism that usually surrounds this holiday: every year you draw a single family member out of the hat and you’re expected to make a present for that person.
Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t because, like any family, there’s a couple of people that are difficult to make things for! Fortunately I drew my father-in-law this time and he’s an avid collector of Hornby Dublo tin-plate trains. I thought my hobby was expensive until I learned he’s quite happy to pay in the region of $400nzd+ for a single antique 1930’s tin-plate Hornby Dublo steam train in working condition.
He’s amassed quite a collection over the years and has started building an impressive layout in his wool shed. It’s just wired up track at the moment but it covers one entire 8′ x 6′ table and is he’s talking about building a second and bridging across to it. He’s also incredibly tolerant because he lets our four year old son play with his (expensive, rare, antique) collection as well. I live in fear of the day CJ breaks something…
Anyway, I’ve had a bunch of Linka molds in my garage for a while now as I was considering using them for Flames of War urban terrain. Unfortunately the 1/76th scale is sufficiently different from 1/100th (or 15mm) to make the doors and windows obviously out-sized.
However as Linka molds were originally created in the late 70’s explicitly for the Hornby Dublo scale I may as well use them as intended! So I intend to build and paint a set of three brick row houses for my father-in-law for this Christmas.
I’ve finished assembling the first this week (see photo) and have enough cast pieces, except windows for the other two. The Link molds cast well in Ultracal 30 and went together fairly easily with careful fitting and a little light sanding of some pieces.
The devil is going to be in the details, like gutters and downpipes, chimney stacks and glass windows as well as painting the buildings to a passable standard. However I always find a hard deadline tends to motivate one quite well!
Very impressive.
What fraction (1/*th) is 28mm? (I believe that’s the measurements for Mordheim/Warhammer.)
Ashton, 28mm is around 1/48th scale. We typically play 28mm scale figures and buildings but use 1/56th scale vehicles so they don’t take up too much table space while gaming.
The doors are far too small for Mordhiem, but you could use the basic textures (brick, stone walls and slate roofs) for Mordheim, plus the windows too I suspect since the windows in Fantasy/Medieval buildings are typically quite small because of the difficulty of making glass.
Hey! Nice to see you’re just getting into Mordheim too judging from your blog. Mordheim (along with Necromunda, the 40k equivalent) are two of Games Workshop’s finest games imho. I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself…particularly playing the Skaven.
Pardon my ignorance but isn’t HO scale actually 1/87 in scale? I thought all the German Marklin and Fleishman stuff was at this ratio; please correct me if I am wrong. Anyway, the Rocco assembled models are believe are in this scale. Flames of War figures are actually very close to this scale. I read that someone was actually using the Rocco models instead of Battlefront as they were truer to scale. My understanding of the Battlefront tanks is that they are +-120% in height which I believe is done to match the total height of their foot figures taking into account the height of the soldier’s base too. This would make the buildings very close to scale if they are in the 1/87 scale ratio. 1/76 and 1/72 are in my experiences, larger than the HO German train lines, models and other figures that I have.
Hi Chris, the Linka molds are designed to work with Hornby Dublo with is British OO or 1:76th.
Wikipedia has a brief history of the British OO scale which mentions British OO uses the same track gauge as 1:87th HO scale - which I wasn’t aware of. Possibly that’s where the confusion arises.