No Paint City Construction

Update on my new pieces for a Wild West town. After showing you the Mine Wheelhouse building  I became a bit enthusiastic and ordered up the Burlesque and Shacks kits from TT Combat as well, but more of those later.

View through the office roof.

The Wheelhouse building took me a few visits to the hobby table to complete. There are instruction to help guide you, but some care was needed all the same, as there were quite a few parts. The finished build will easily be the tallest thing on the table, it's quite a structure! The only area thats not quite to plan are the long supporting struts on the left of the photo. They are not attached to the tower, and as they are the first pieces glued to the base the alignment is out. It has been "sorted" by adding a couple of tabs to the tower to keep them in line. Funnily enough the pictures on the Sarissa Precision site seem to show that build perhaps having a similar issue!

With the main section (sitting behind) removed.

Something good about the kit that is not evident is the amount of areas that are accessible for figures. The back office roof comes off for access, but also there is a nice line of site down the winch shaft to ground level. The entire back section also comes off to give full access to the ground level, which is open from the back of the building to the front. Much more play-ability.

TT Combat Wild West buildings divide opinion on the forums, which some not likeing their chunkiness or lack of historical accuaracy. This is fair enough, but they are great value gaming pieces in my opinion that set the tone of the game just fine, so I have a few of them. The Burlesque has a couple of "oddities" however. One is the "XXX" on the front, but this can easily be covered up with a printed out sign, plenty of which are available on the interweb.

The second is that the balcony is fully attached to the top floor of the building and essentially the staircase, which is a bit of a pain if you want to access the ground floor (which you will do). The "fix" is relatively straight forward though, requiring no new equipment. I cut off the balcony, making sure the first floor tabs were still on the building floor. Using some spare mdf "sprue" I glued a thin piece on the building wall to support the balcony (underlined in red in the photo above), and used a couple of other bits of sprue as front supports coming up from the walkway.

Now the balcony is attached to the front of the ground floor, allowing the first floor to be easily removed by itself.

I think the Shacks kit is a great wee table filled, giving some extra atmosphere with small run down constructions. The lack of instructions does make the build a bit of a process of elimination, but nothing too frustrating.

So now I have all these new pieces to paint, as well as the TT Combat town kit that's been waiting for quite a while now. Best get the papers down on the table top...