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

When I think about Italy, I see Tuscan hill villages (and Chianti, cheese, good food but that’s another story). Now while the whole of Italy isn’t covered with Tuscan hill villages (just Tuscany has Tuscan hill villages 🙂 ) I think building one will certainly set off the battles that were fought later in 1944 and 1945, once Cassino had been taken. Something like the picture below sums up what I’m aiming for, although probably more of a small hamlet rather than a town.

Bizarrely, I can’t find any good 1:100 scale model Italian buildings. There’s some OK Spanish peninsula options that look similar, but nothing that really works. So I’m going to have to make my own.

I considered card models but it just doesn’t have the durability so I’ve opted for mdf. I’ve also found some sheets of the below on ebay which is 1:100 scale and looks exactly like the very distinctive roof tiles used in Italy.

Armed with just a trusty metal ruler, a pencil and a sharp knife, I drew out the panels on some 3mm mdf and cut them out. This took a little time but in the end, I had a three story building which I was able to glue together with PVA.

As an experiment, to get the texture of the render used in Italy, I mixed up pva with polyfilla. This will hopefully have the advantage of sealing the mdf together while also creating the render. You can see the three floors below.

Now the roof was tricky. I had to get a calculator out and go back to my trigonometry to work out the angles and lengths for the roof. I even had to use the mnemonic Silly Old Hitler Couldn’t Advance His Troops Over Asia (a little apt, given the project).

I got the mathematics right but cutting 3mm mdf with enough precision just wouldn’t work.

While the plastic sheet tiles look good and I think the render has worked, the whole wonky look and the fact that the roof doesn’t fit is irritating. I’m also never going to have the time to design and cut out enough buildings to populate a village. So I need to find another way.

I then found this site:

http://www.razorlab.co.uk/

And I think that this could be my answer. They take vector line diagrams and use these to laser cut your chosen material – and 3mm mdf is just one such material. So I’m going to design the building and see whether I can get this right before launching head first into it.