Kira’s Club Terrain – A Spring Clean Challenge

It’s been a while since I last posted: a mix of work being what it is with a bunch of overtime and some boring everyday stuff taking up life things had slowed right down and the project entered somewhat of a lull.

So I checked the last entry and did some sums (used my fingers and my toes) and I believe that this is week 11. So here we are…

But whilst that is not necessarily all behind me (especially the work stuff…) I did manage to get all of the pieces and bits and gubbins all cleaned up and ready to go and that at least has me feeling pretty good.

Having the bits ready, I decided to start playing around with the bits and pieces like a Lego set and see what I could come up with. It started out as largely little uncoordinated blobs as I was going “I wonder what happens if I put these together?” and “how does that attach to that?” and “could I put this with this?” and “how do I do that?”.
I didn’t really take any photos of this as I was just playing around with abstract clumps but it taught me a fair bit about how the system worked and all the bits fit together. Most importantly, I ended up squinting at the website and working out how to build the bridge.

This gave me the inspiration to build a terrain piece using said bridge that I could have straddling a road like some sort of ruined gatehouse or check point in the city that was.

The main structural elements where designed by myself with construction help and decorative bits aided by my own two junior OTTers.

So that’s a good start but, as mentioned nearly 3 months ago, this point of this project is to get this terrain up and painted so it’s not just more grey plastic on the table.

Now, my plan for this weeks is three fold.

1. I haven’t done a lot of big terrain projects so I am going to start with some advice from the interwebs. I have been debating whether to go down either of the airbushing or drybrushing routes before picking out details (or perhaps one leading to the other as we layer up?). I once has a quick rummage on the YouTubes and there are some tutorials for painting this stuff from when if came out through Kickstarter so I’m going to put some time aside to watch through a bunch of those and see what inspires me.
2. Once I have been suitably inspired, whether it be a step by step guide or cherry pick bits from across whatever I end up looking into, I will put together A Plan. This will be the steps I intend to come at this with so I can prep the majority of what I need.
   It’s possible that things will change once the paint starts getting on the model but as the venerable Adam Savage says: it’s not a problem to solve, it’s a process to manage but it’s still nice to have an idea of where I am going before diving in.
3. Clear my hobby space! My airbrush station/place I put stuff to dry has been holding a bunch of stuff out of the way in my hobby space for the last few months. Whether it will be used for actual airbrushing or just a space to stack all the pieces as I paint them I am going to need the space. So the last part is to roll my sleeves up and get it squared away and ready.

I’d love to drop some smaller updates over the week as I work through some of this stuff and get the results down into the blog but… see previous comments on work and how much time it keeps taking up. I’m of a mind to direct what free time I can to this though as I want to see some progress myself. I just hope I can scrape together the time to also blog about it.

Until then.

My Pledge for Week 8: Monday 13th May 2024 – Sunday 20th May 2024

Time to get back on the proverbial hobby horse (see what I did there) and try and push the prep work to the point where the terrain is at least assembled and usable.

As I opined in previous weeks I want to play around with the pieces and decide if I wanted to sacrifice the possible usability of some of the decorative bits in order to pursue using magnets to link the pieces vs the increased flexibility of using the default pegs.

To test this I would like to take this stuff along to the club and see about getting some hands on it in a real work setting and some feedback from my compatriots. The next club night is next Wednesday so I’d really like to have enough to slap together a setup by then.

So, it’s been about two weeks since my last post (two weeks and a day to be precise but that last day was because the web sigh was overloaded last night and I couldn’t get the project blog to load, what can you do?). What happened?

Well, as it has before and will continue to do so: life happened. A mix being busier with the kids, work being stuffed to the brim with mania and also pulling some overtime as a result (at least I’m getting paid for this, right?) has left me with way less hobby time than usual. That’s not to say that nothing got done, just that what has been has been going at a veritable crawl.

None the less, it’s been a while and I am still working at it so I thought I would update even if only for my own benefit and it also gives me a chance to talk about some of the more difficult revelations I have had so far with this project.

So, I was originally hoping that having the bigger stuff done would mean that I was over the hump of the work for this but as I realised, this was certainly not the case.
Let me tell you about these little blighters that perfectly encapsulate my point:

So these little pieces are for creating ruins of multiple levels where there are some other gubbins to slot walls and floors together and then these go around the border of the floors to fill the resulting gap.

I initially started out with the longest of these and then all had around 6 sprue gates to clean up. After a few days I finished these and moved on to the middle size. These only had around 5 sprue gates each but… there were twice as many of them. This made for 5/3s as many to handle. Then came the small ones which had three sprue gates each but then there were four times as many of these which meant 2 times the total sprue gates. That’s a lot of maths!

I spent ages on these as the sprue gates where the majority of what needed cleaning up and I guess the lesson I learnt was that smaller pieces do not mean less work.

But at least they are done now and can be added to the pile of ready stuff.

Time to make another hobby pledge and try and get this phase of the project over the line.

As suggested last week, this is just a quick check in for the multi-week pledge that I made last time.

To start with, I forged on with what I am considering the core elements of the build so I have pieces to play with. This is just about done with most of the pieces for the walls and floors cleaned and ready with just the little covers that finish the peg holes to go.

I also took the time to break down my to do list into each individual bundle that I have laid out, just to make it a bit easier to track. This does mean I have gone from 11 things to do up to 22 things to do but at least it is easier (for me at least) to get a sense of how much is left to get done as not all are equal.

And as a nice split I now have 11 done (including those listed as Building which still need part gluing together). What remains is smaller pieces so hopefully won’t take more than the same time again to get done.

And that is just about that. I get the feeling there will be another two weeks of work here if we include the building of pieces once they are cleaned which I might as well as it’s all got to be done.

I’ll be back again to check in again next week as I try and keep this train rolling.

My Pledge for Week 4: Monday 22nd April 2024 – Sunday 28th April 2024

This weeks pledge will continue to be a broad one: get as many pieces for the City Ruins set cleaned of sprue gates and mould lines in preparation for the eventual painting that is coming.

However, as I work through these there is a something I want to be thinking about and I’d like to get a few more pieces ready so that I can start to play around the idea.

Once all of the wall pieces have been married up with both their column pieces at one end and these little caps at the other, they end up with a series of holes.
As you can see in this photo of me ham-fistedly holding an example of incomplete parts together, these create a recess for pegs that will keep the piece together when assembled into a building.

One of the options advertised when this set came out was the option to use magnets in place of these pegs for a quicker snap-to/pop-apart experience. On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. With the intention of these being used at our local gaming club: the faster the setup and the tear down, the more time for playing during club time. There is a but, however:

There are these decorative elements that can be inserted into the recesses in place of pegs where one is not being used to connect two pieces of wall when setting up the terrain that can add some flair.

Some of these are little things like pipe ends and lamps, some of them seem a little more chunky and structural. Memory has failed me and I cannot recall if any of these offer anything more than just pure decoration however and vanity pictures on Archon’s website are a little light on all the different possible options as to what all of these could be.

What I want to do, sooner rather than later, is get some of these cleaned up and looked at to decide if any of them are worth wanting to leave access to the peg recesses to make use of.
If there are any worth wanting to incorporate into the set, could they also use magnets somehow? If so, how much extra work might this be? Adding the magnets would be a nice touch for use at the club but leaving a substantial part of the kit unusable as a result would be sad.
Conversely, giving up that convenience for a few twiddly bits that people might not even be inclined to bother going around a plugging in with the constraints of a club night with a closing time would be a poor execution on what this work is meant to achieve.

If I can get enough pieces from each related pile cleaned up enough to maybe dry fit things together or sub in some blutack for the time being, I can start to get a sense of which side I might want to come down on.
Whether I get that far in the next seven days remains to be seen but it means I might, for example, pick up some of these twiddly bits next after finishing the walls instead of say… the walls toppers for the time being.

As an idle curiosity: I keep track of these bits of work through a service called Trello. This is a bit of a hold over from work where Jira, another product by Trello’s owning company Atlassian is effectively the defacto tool for tracking pieces of work that need doing and where they are up to in the world of software development.
Trello is like the much simpler version of this with a version that is free with a limited number of boards so I started using it some years ago to track of what pieces of projects are up to where.

Whilst these groups of pieces can vary a fair bit from almost singular pieces to piles of dozens of fiddly pieces, I can at least get a sense of what is outstanding to complete a step for a given project.
As you can see, having filtered my board down to just the Rampart – City Ruins stuff, there is plenty more for me to be getting on with.

As usual, I shall be back in about a week with an update.

Depending on how far I can get with “enough stuff to see if I want to magnetise” line of thinking it might be a more in-depth analysis of my results or it might just be a “got more done, still working” with maybe a screenshot of my updated Trello board.

Whilst I do want to keep blogging this process as it keeps me focuses on progressing each week, I am also aware that several weeks of “here’s a pile of grey plastic that I have cleaned and here’s a pile I haven’t” isn’t going to make for the most exciting content and padding it out the sake of making the blog look like there is more going on is likely to make for uninteresting reading.
Over the next few weeks of churning through these pieces, I may opt for more short and sweet check-ins unless some noteworthy eventuality is reached.

Either way: Until then.

Right, I’m back and it’s time for an update on the City Ruins set and how I am progressing on it. Spoiler: as I was thinking last week, there is a lot to do on this and yet somehow, there is even more…

With the half a week I had at my disposal since the last post, I’ve gotten through the set of larger walls and the majority of the smaller walls.

Nothing of particular note here, just a lot of plastic and a lot of removing sprue gates and mould lines.

Moving on!

That leaves this lot:

• The remainder of the smaller walls
• Wall ends (these attach the end of each wall to complete the column end of each piece)
• Ledges/toppers, a selection of bits to attach to the top of wall and to where stacked walls join to break up the boxy look.
• A whole pile gubbins including
  • Magnets holes and pegs (more on these in a bit)
  • End blocks
  • Decorative fixtures, an Archon staple of things to put in the peg holes when there are not being used.

And yet there is more…

Honestly, surprised I didn’t notice this whilst setting the Pledge last week. Walls are all well and good but this set is about modular buildings and buildings typically have multiple floors.

Whilst I was continuing to tidy through my stuff for this project I found this box of other bits on a shelf and had a “oh, yeah” moment as I realised these where in this set as well.
There’s a whole mess of stuff in here though most of it falls into either floors to stack on walls and make more levels, steps to get up to those floors and bridges to cross between those floors.

So that prediction that this is going to be a few weeks work is going to be coming true as I’ve probably nearly doubled the work load by finding these.
Best get on with it hadn’t I?

Straight on to the Week 5 Pledge. It won’t surprise anyone to read that it will broadly be “do more of the stuff above” but there is something I have begun to ponder on.

Check back in that post to follow along.

My Pledge for Week 4: Monday 16th April 2024 – Sunday 21st April 2024

It’s been a fun few weeks getting into the swing of some regular hobby progression and squaring away some of the smaller things I’ve had outstanding for a little while now but ultimately I got into this to sort some more terrain for the West Moor Gaming Club and, sadly, there is not a lot of demand for 15mm WW2 era terrain going at the moment.

Until that changes it’s time to start on something that fits onto the more common line up of games. Sci-fi, 28mm and Grimdark.

And so, my plan is to start working on this:

“What is that?” might reasonably ask. A pile of plastic to be sure but what is it destined to become.

This is a collection of pieces from Archon’s Rampart series of terrains, specifically the City Ruins set. If you look back at the prologue I had a whole mess of Rampart pieces awaiting being properly tended to and with these I intend to start tackling that particular mountain.
I only hope that is everything from the City Ruins as there sure is a lot in those trays from a few of the sets but if not, there is certainly enough to be getting on with here.

As for my pledge itself with this: I find myself in a similar position to when I started the 4Ground kits in that I am don’t have a great idea of how quick I can work through this stuff as it has been a good few years since I seriously worked on anything from Archon (like some of the original Dungeons & Lasers) so here is what I plan to do.

Given the sheer amount of pieces here I think that this might realistically be a multi-week job to get done without abandoning everything else going on in the real work so it’s time to take a measure of working on these.
With 5 days left to me in this pledge week, I am going to clean up as much of this as possible and then use that to give an idea of how long it might take to get it all done. I am hoping the whole lot could be about 2 weeks, maybe 3 at the outside but I shall reconvene at the end of this week and see how things have gone.
If nothing else, I plan to transition to painting once this subset is ready rather than spending months cleaning and building it all but still not having it ready for the table.

How will I get on? Check back after the weekend to see.

I’ll be back at the end of the week to report on proceedings. Will it be Sunday? Will it be Monday? Tuesday?

Who knows. Existence is chaos and time is a flat circle with no meaning.
Until then.

Submitted by a time out