As we’re now dangerously near Christmas I’ve been spending all my modeling time finishing the Linka Dublo terraced houses for my father in law’s present. I’ve just finished varnishing and assembling them tonight, so here’s all three in a row!
For some variety I’ve painted the doors different colours and glued different ‘drapes’ into the windows. The drapes are fashioned from various bits of coloured paper, while the window panes are cut from a 1mm thick piece of transparent lamination sheet supplied by my lovely wife. I was going to sacrifice an OHP transparency for the windows, but the thicker laminating plastic turned out to be a lot easier to work with, plus the extra thickness means it does quite a convincing job of looking like plate glass.
Due to the detail work I wanted to do with the windows the buildings were assembled in two stories which turned out to be a little problematic when it came to the house with the blue door because the stories don’t fit together terribly well. This is a little annoying but isn’t a show stopper as most of the problem has occurred on the interior walls which are hidden when the house is placed in the row. If you’re wondering what’s going on with the chimneys and doors, it’s because the house with the green door has been assembled mirrored from the other two houses just for a little variation.
Painting the Linka brick work turned out to be fairly painless as the bricks pop out nicely when painted diagonally with a wide drybrush. The buildings you see here have been drybrushed with GW’s Graveyard Earth and then had individual bricks picked out in Kommando Khaki, Terracotta Red and Scorched Brown. The slate roofs were painting with a blend of Fortress Grey and Chaos Black and then given a dark ink wash just to dull the greys down a touch.
Everything was then coated with a spray matt varnish and then the doors and window frames were hand painted with a Tamiya gloss varnish to simulate enamel paintwork. The gloss varnish work doesn’t show up too well in these night-time photos, but is noticeable on the models themselves.
For the Flames of War gamers out there, here’s a comparison shot of a 1:100th FOW Sherman tank against the 1:86th Dublo scale buildings. As you’d expect the Shermie looks a touch small against the over-scale buildings, particularly when you compare it with the WWII period photo next to it. I admit the two photos are taken from different angles, but I feel the top of the Sherman’s turret should at least exceed the height of the ground floor house windows. Unfortunately I neglected to put a base of men in the shot as well, but I can tell you they definitely look noticeably small next to the doors and windows of the Dublo scale houses.
So it’s hard to say how useful Linkaworld Linka molds will be to the average Flames of War gamer. In my opinion the Linka doors and windows definitely won’t work well next to Flames of War vehicles and figure bases. However there are several Linka molds that contain basic textures that would be excellent for Flames of War terrain. Molds B1, B5 and B6 all contain brick sections of various shapes that could be easily put together to make convincing bombed out buildings. Similar ruined stone buildings could be constructed from molds S1, S3 and S5.
As the molds are only $12usd each and made from a very robust rubber material I’d say it’s probably not a bad investment to pick up a few for your Flames of War table if you need to construct a lot of simple, ruined buildings.
Anyway, here’s hoping my father in law enjoys these buildings! And have a good Christmas yourself!
Great job overall, this is a very nice Christmas gift for your father in law.
To bad the seam between the lower and upper half of the house shows up so much. And of course the funky scale of the molds, but I guess this probably is some kind of standard railroad modeling scale?
Yes I’m reasonably happy with them. I left it a bit late and didn’t quite detail them as much as I wanted too (I have plastic ‘U’ pieces and rod that I intended to use for guttering). The seam is a little exaggerated in these photos because of the low angle and the strong overhead lighting. It doesn’t look too bad when viewing the buildings from above.
Yes, Linka molds are designed to be used with British OO scale which is 1:86th. That’s basically why I resorted to creating my own facades for Flames of War.
the plain brick walls wouls look good for the other 3 walls on your facades
To be honest it doesn’t look so bad against the Sherman might have to invest in some of these in the new year.
I see there’s an actuall comparison shot of some FOW based infantry against a building - not too bad really. And British OO is actually 1/76th…it uses the same track as European/US HO whihc is 1/87th. And given the slight amount of scale creep with the FOW stuff :) you can get away with 1:87th stuff and the Linka looks good for solid Euro style buildings anyway
If memory serves, a Sherman is something like nine feet high - in fact, I think they’re a bit higher than they are wide. On that basis, you’re right, the FOW Sherman ought to be considerably higher than the top of the door to be in scale. Personally, I’m always surprised by how big the tanks are in person. I visited the Bovington Tank Museum a couple of years back and I was just floored by the substance and reality of the damn things. (If you’re over there, I STRONGLY recommend a side trip to Bovington, although I do have to say that the information I was given was deceiving in that it’s a substantial walk from the train stop to the museum.)
Sid, I’d love to visit Bovington, but it’s been a while since I’ve been to England! Our local war memorial Museum has a couple of restored WWII era fighters (a Spitfire and a Zero) and I remember being surprised at how large these single seater fighters are when you’re standing next to them.
I guess we forget how much of a proving ground WWII was for new technologies and how quickly armor/engines/weaponry improved over those short and bloody years. It was WWII that essentially gave us modern rocketry and the jet engine for example…
My favourite part of the Museum was a literal cross section of a Centurion tank - cut in half lengthwise. Boy, talk about getting a difficult assignment at work: “Bob, see that tank? Guess what we want you to do to it.”