75th Anniversary of Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Terrain Build)

I’m going to try and make a machine gun nest that is made of logs and dug in to the surrounding ground. I’ll start with a base made of 3mm MDF cut into the approximate size of a medium FoW base. I’ve chamfered the edges and scored the top.

I’m going to build the earth out of filler so the scoring will help with the adhesion. I’ve place a decent amount on to the base and then an extra dollop in the middle.

The logs will be made out of cocktail sticks (tooth picks) which are a decent scale for 15mm. I’ve started by sticking two uprights at the front of the base.

Behind the uprights, I want some short logs sloping backward to create a V shape. The idea being that the machine gun would be positioned at the apex of the V. To do this, I’ve gently pushed the dollop of filler forward toward the uprights while pushing the short cocktail sticks in to the filler.

I now need to create the roof. I’ve cut some longer cocktail sticks and have gently pushed these into the dollop of filler and across the V of the short sticks.

I then put a little more filler over the ends of the newly laid ‘roof’ to hold these in place and to make it look like the nest is dug in.

Final step was to push the filler at the apex of the V out of the way to create the impression of an opening (like drilling out the gun barrel!). I’ve also put some water on my finger and smoothed out the filler.

I just need to leave these to dry now – I’ll give it 24 hours just to be sure as the filler is quite thick in the middle and will take a bit longer to harden.