Building the Old West
Recommendations: 1292
About the Project
I attempt to make an Old West town to play Fistful of Lead, Reloaded.
Related Genre: Western
Related Contest: TerrainFest 2023
This Project is Active
Painting the General Store
Interior done. Floor assemblies are off to the left. 
Roof and floor. 
All the sub assemblies. I plan on painting the frame of the sign white and probably the door and window trim as white too. 
Everything assembled but not glued. I’ll probably do another coat of green and I still need to do the white trim. Assembling the General Store
This time when I assembled everything I glued the walls together and put them on the base but didn’t glue them to the base. I then let the glue dry and removed the walls as seen here. Should make painting the interior easier. 
Here’s everything done as separate assemblies. Stores and Civilians
The next three buildings will be stores or offices. They’ll have a little more color as the store fronts and signage will face mainstreet while the sides and rear will be fairly bare.
Similar to the jail, the front signage will be a bit more elaborate and colorful.
And every self respecting Old West town has a cast of colorful civilians. In order to distinguish them, the civilians are based on square bases. Square bases have only four sides and this reflects the limited in game functions of these models. The posse members have round bases because a circle is infinite and therefore represents the infinite variety and power of our tabletop heroes.
And thus I prove the superiority of round bases over square bases.
Hi Gerry! ?
Squirrel! 
And there may be snakes somewhere. Hey, Sarissa! Touch ups and lessons learned
An open letter to Sarissa Precision. Good kits overall but they need a few additional interior details. In this kit, there are two doorframes to go around the entrance from the office area to the cell block area but none for the cell windows, the front or side doors. As a result when I applied the paper detailing it looks a bit ragged near those openings. If there were framing, the frame would cover up much of that.
The paper detailing is nice and I’m mostly pleased but I definitely need to work on this some more. A few spots got marred by some stray PVA glue and even the most careful filing and cutting still left some ragged edges. I’ll probably skip this step in most of the stores but come back to it whenever I get around to the hotel as I want to put up some fancy wallpaper on the walls.
As expected a few parts need to be sanded down to get a proper fit but nothing too bad. I did have to repaint a few areas.
Detail of interior door heading into the cell area. The supplied doorframe neatly hides any rough edges around the door. 
Detail of the front door. As you can see, it’s a bit ragged around the edges and down in the right hand corner. If anyone from Sarissa is reading this, there’s enough free space on the MDF board in this kit to add two more door frames. 
Three more window frames would be nice here. 
Clearly I didn’t take into account that the back of the sign doesn’t need the paper detailing. Probably won’t paint it over because if you remove the roof to play inside the jail, then that wall will look odd with the upper half painted in the dark brown and the lower half in the lighter paper detailing. 
I may do a little more weathering. Possibly a bit of drybrushing of the brick area but pretty happy with how it turned out. 
Jail and gallows together. Assembly and Details
Partial assembly showing a few interior details 
Side door with door frame attached. There’s an exterior door frame but no interior. 
Iron frames for the cell windows. Again, there are no internal frames. The roof hasn’t been fitted yet, it’s just loose. 
Signage is free from Sarissa Precision. An additional sign will be fitted just to the right of the door. The door, door frame, window frame and sign frame are all a single piece of MDF. 
Sheriff’s Office and gallows side by side. Trimming and Dry Fit
Once the paper had dried and trimmed off the excess. While I did use a knife for some of the trimming, a file seems to work better.
With the brickwork trimmed, I added wood paneling. 
Did a dry fit of the iron bars and placed the walls in their relative positions. I’m debating making the cell floor into brick or possibly concrete leaving it as a deliberate weakness as a story element. Changed my mind
And of course like any port, I changed my mind after thinking about things. I’ve decided to go ahead and get some of the Sarissa Precision downloads and print out some brick and flooring patterns.
After printing out the brick pattern, I just cut out a section slightly larger than the wall by holding the wall up against the paper and then just trimming it down. 
I then covered the interior with PVA glue. 
I then lined up a line of the brick work to the top of the wall so that about one layer of brick is above the wall. I then slowly rolled the paper out and the vigorously scrubbed out any air bubbles. I had to do this several times. 
Exterior side of the wall. I’ll let everything dry and trim everything down later. 
One of the other walls. I’ll add wood planking to the buff area later. 
This is the opposite wall that has a door detail on the exterior. This door frame is actually supposed to go on the outside and there isn’t an interior door frame so I’ll use this as a template to paint and/or plank the interior door detail. Bricks and Wood
In thinking about how a Western town would be built up, a town Marshall or county Sheriff would eventually make an appearance and would indicate the town is growing up from a fly by night campsite to an up and coming town that might want a degree of respectability. For reference, a Sheriff is an elected official and are found at the county or parish level of government. Each county will have a county seat which is essentially an officially established town. Most county government would then be in the county seat, including the Sheriff’s office.
Marshals can be elected or appointed and have a much wider range of functions from depending on the jurisdiction. In most Western towns, the Marshall would probably have had jurisdiction in just the town and would probably have been appointed.
I decided that the citizens probably wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money on a jail so no fancy paint jobs. Bare wood and brick and probably a nice sign.
Main floor and front door. 
Side and back wall. The brick was painted with red mixed with black in a roughly 3:1 ratio. The iron bars for the windows are black. 
The rest of the iron bars were also painted black. Need to decide on an interior color. I’m thinking a pale buff or beige color. It’s a jail, so nothing fancy. There’s no interior detailing and I don’t want to make things too fancy or create too much work. I’ll save that for some of the other buildings.
