Wednesday 22 July 2009

WWG Mayhem Garage


My second review of my World Works Games buildings features the second model I made - the Mayhem Garage. This building can be found in the Mayhem Armoury set, along with an apartment and four pick-up trucks.

The garage has been built according to the instructions with two extras not found in the basic set. They are the curved roof and the garage door track, both of which are kitbashes that are available from the WWG website store.

These three photos of the front of the building show my garage door closed, half-open and fully open.
Getting the roller door to work properly was quite a challenge. You can leave it closed if you want or the default solution is to hinge it along the top so that it can swing inwards or outwards, depending on how you fit it in place. My door makes use of the garage door track kitbash and slides open like a real sliding garage door.

This side view shows the curved roof. I mentioned in my previous review that I make my buildings out of mounting board and glue the pieces to it. However, there are times when mounting board will not work. This is particularly true of curved structures, like this roof. Mounting board is simply too thick to bend and hence I use a thinner card to reinforce my photographic paper. I use thin card that comes in a variety of colours and sizes from any good art supplier. If you're stuck to find any, a good alternative would be to use a breakfast cereal box. That's about the same thickness as what I use.

Likewise, all of my doors are glued to the same thin card. This is because I prefer my doors to be not as thick as my walls. I stick one side of the door to the card then cut it out. If there is a window in the door, like in the back door shown above, I use transparency paper for the window. Before sticking the reverse side of the door in place I stick a couple of pieces of masking tape to the card. These form the hinges. If you overlap the door by about an inch that works well for sticking the masking tape to the mounting card. It is important to stick your doors in place before you glue the interior wall in place. I also use the same thin card to make the door frames. This is very fiddly work because the frame is no more than 2mm thick. A good tip is to edge the door frame before gluing it in place.

The roof has been stuck to a piece of foam board so that it fits snugly in place.

Here you can see the interior of the garage. The furniture (table and blue heater) are part of the model. You can see the two upside-down L-shaped door tracks on either side of the main door.

I cut out the dartboard and notice board that you see on the back wall and glued them to mounting board before sticking them back in place. This just adds to the "realism" of the model.

The front wall is made out of three pieces of mounting card stuck back to back. The outer and inner walls have the door opening cut to its normal size. Sandwiched in between them is a piece where the opening is about 5mm wider on the two sides. I stuck the door to thin card. There is a 4mm square tab at either side of the bottom and top of the door. The lower tabs fit into the groove on either side of the door opening. The top of the door is reinforced with a strip of mounting card. I glued the long door track strip this piece. This gives you something to grip when you slide the door up or down . You can see horizontal lines all the way up the door. I carefully scored these with a blunt knife so that the door could bend when it opens. As you can see, this is a complicated piece of engineering to get it to work, but I'm please to say it does work. If you were to think it's just not worth the hassle I wouldn't blame you! This is a conversion for experienced modellers only.

When the door is fully open I tuck the long strip at the top of the door under the two door tracks to keep it in place as shown above. The door tracks have enough flexibility in them to allow you to move them to one side slightly so that you can place the strip underneath them. I'm proud of my conversion although I am certain it is not how the creator of this kitbash intended it to be used! Sadly, this kitbash does not come with instructions, which has caused much scratching of heads as to how it is supposed to work on the WWG forum.

Note the blue toolbox to the right of the table above. The front of the box was part of the wall decoration. This was no good to me - it should be three-dimensional! So I cut it out and made a small box out of mounting board. I stuck the front of the toolbox in place and then painted the top and two sides to match the front. Yet another example of my going the extra mile to get the best build possible!

In a similar vein, there is a spare tyre that is part of the floor decoration. Again, I cut it out and glued it atop four pieces of circular mounting board.

I did exactly the same with the ladders, fan, clock and tool-board that you can see on this far wall. At first glance this looks like it should be an easy model to make and for most people it will be. I can't imagine that many folk will want to go to the same amount of time and effort that I took to complete my model, but, hey, I enjoyed the challenge and I think the results are outstanding.

5 comments:

  1. Very nice - esp the idea of mounting the wall stuff on more mounting board. (Mental note to do the same)

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  2. Sometimes it's the little things I do that makes a model come to life, as it were, Munce. That's one of those little things. Simple but effective. Be aware, it will pay you to edge the piece you cut out before sticking it back in place.

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  3. Thanks a lot, Vamp. I'm happy to just get a few buildings together with reasonably square corners and not too many wrinkles in the walls and then you go a build a freaking WORKING GARAGE DOOR for goodness sake. You lousy professional artist, you! It's not fair I tells ya...

    Seriously, another amazing job. Keep the series going, if only to give the rest of us poor schlubs something to aspire to. :)

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  4. Laughing my ass off, John! The idea is to make this a weekly feature of the blog, at least until I run out of models to review. Still, I've got lots of work in the pipeline and next up is the much requested semi-detached houses review.

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