Nuenen House #3 Finished?

I thought that I had finished this first house in my Band of Brothers project, but after looking at it on my painting table for the last few days, I'm not sure it is finished. I think that I have put my finger on the source of the problem: the roof tiles are too clean and don't match the rest of the building, so probably need a bit of weathering to blend them in. I might also paint a few more of the individual bricks too; the two ends of the house are a bit plain whereas I think the two long sides look better with a higher proportion of darker bricks.

Rather than just taking photos of the buildings, I thought that having some figures next to them, to indicate the size and scale, would help set them off.  So, I've bought a platoon's worth of the 82nd Airborne.

These are the first American Airborne that I have painted, so I painted up the two Pathfinder figures first and tried out some colour schemes on them to work out how I would paint the rest. If they didn't work out, then I probably wouldn't use them in a game anyway. My issue with the Pathfinder figures is that they all have mohawks! Is this just a WWII myth? Was there a photo of just a couple of guys from the Pathfinders with crazy haircuts, which has influenced everyone's perception of them ever since, or was this actually really common?

I've also been trying out a new painting technique, which I think looks OK so far. It doesn't involve slapping loads of Agrax Earthshade over the whole model!

I plan to paint up 16 figures and then get back onto designing, architecting, cutting and building the next building in Nuenen.

Progress on Nuenen House #3

This is the first house from my Band of Brothers Nuenen project, but I've called it House #3 based on its map location. I realise that this is nowhere near as exciting for anyone other than me - it's just another MDF kit building - but for me it has grown from an idea into something that is almost ready to place on the wargaming table.

Progress is being made! The roofers need to fit the tiles :-) but all the walls are up and in the process of being finished off. Once I have added the mortar to the bricks on the chimney, I will then affix the pre-cut tiles. Here is one elevation with the base colour painted on and mortar added to the brickwork.

It has taken several weeks to get to this point and I have learned many more lessons on the way, so the next building will inevitably be better and take less time to complete. This was the first piece off the laser cutter, about a week ago; I painted the edges of the internal window frames prior to assembling it just to make it a bit easier.

Here is the interior view of the same piece with the "glazing" added.

And the same piece from the outside.

This shot shows the window cills; it also shows where I forgot to switch on the air assist for the laser cutter when it was engraving the brick courses: it has left a burnt residue!

One lesson: I didn't account for the extra 2mm required for the base, so there are some small gaps where the walls are supposed to slot into place.

Starting to take shape; this is the four internal walls glued to the base.

The first of the exterior walls glued onto the interior face.

And another external wall in place.

Once all the walls had dried, I attached the gable ends and started to paint the base colour. It is quite a bright yellow ("Chueca" from B&Q) when it first goes on, but it does dull down once the "mortar" is applied.

Really starting to look like a house now, with the roof, chimneys, dormer window and decorative brickwork added, plus the base colour painted all over. I've also affixed thin card, again cut to near perfection by the laser, to the bottom of the house beneath the line of the windows. I need to allow for an extra millimetre when cutting due to the thickness of the "kerf".

A close-up shot of one wall. Note that the base colour is not uniformly applied, which is by design because it makes the final brickwork look more natural and weathered.

Once the "mortar" has been applied, it looks a lot more faded ,weathered and irregular.

The last bit of laser cutting I have done for this house was to cut (and then paint) some brick arches to fit above the windows and doors. The mortar needs to be applied to these too, which will lighten the brick colour.

The end is in sight for this building, so I've ordered up some Artizan US paratroopers from Great Escape Games, so that I can take some photos with Easy Company in the foreground.

Lessons from the Laser Cutter

I have been experimenting further with the capabilities of my new laser cutter, which has involved methodically testing a number of variables:

• Height of the laser (which determines the focus)
• Materials (different sheets of MDF)
• Number of passes
• Output power
• Speed

I started off performing a ramp test, which showed me where the ideal height for the laser to be positioned above the material should be. However, the "hobby" laser cutter I have purchased (the Neje Laser Master 2S Plus), does not allow the laser to be accurately moved up and down on the Z axis.  To move the height of the laser, you need an allen key to unscrew a bolt, which then allows the laser module to be moved. This is not conducive to very fine levels of control because I cannot guarantee that I am moving the laser module by hand a millimetre at a time. So...the ramp test got in me positioned in the right ballpark.

Height/Focusing of the Laser

I performed some cutting tests with it positioned according to the ramp test results and settled on some other variables (5mm/sec and 75% power) for the testing. Because the laser I have is at the low/cheaper end of the output scale, I need to maximise every watt of output to get the best cut, so accurate focusing is important. Rather than moving the laser module any more, it is now screwed firmly into place, but I performed another four height tests by raising and lowering the height of the cutting bed by -1mm, -2mm, +1mm and +2mm to find out whether the focusing could be improved to get better cutting power. I performed cutting tests using 4, 5 and 6 passes at each height too.

As it turned out, the height of the cutting bed in relation to the position of the laser module was spot on, but the test proved that the laser was focused correctly.

Materials

Something else that I discovered whilst testing is the variability in materials. I want to use my laser cutter primarily for cutting sheets of MDF to make buildings for my Band of Brothers Nuenen project, so that is what I have been using for all the tests so far. I had read on various forums that MDF is not consistent in its composition, but even two sheets, which were delivered to me in the same batch from the same manufacturer performed differently. The difference wasn't great (5 passes versus 6 passes to get a really clean cut), but it was different nevertheless, so needs to be accounted for.

Another difference that I was expecting, though not in the way that it turned out, was between 2mm and 3mm MDF. I expected the cutter to require more passes for the 3mm sheets, but it actually required less (4 to 5 passes) than the 2mm. The density of the 3mm is probably lower.

I purchased the 2mm from a supplier in the UK - they are the only place that I have found so far that sells 2mm sheets, though it is excellent value and great service. The 3mm came from a Chinese supplier on Amazon. The 3mm is the lighter sheet on the left; lightness being an indicator of density perhaps?

You can see some of the other tests that I have been performing, trying out different line thicknesses for engraving the detail of the brickwork. The house I am currently designing is "House 3", which looks like this in Band of Brothers:

The bricks are a base yellow colour, but have a lot of variability in them. This is what I achieved on my first attempt at engraving and then painting:

The mortar between the bricks was produced by scraping some wall filler (spackle for our American cousins) across the engraved lines, then wiping off the excess before it dried too much. The variability in brick colour is created using some Agrax Earthshade for the darker bricks and a wash of brick red paint for the reddish hues, plus the original yellow base colour (a colour tester pot called "Chueca" from B&Q) to bring out some of the yellow. I think it is going to look awesome on a whole building. The colouring isn't exactly the same as the screen grab from BoB, but the TV producers desaturated the colouring of the film to create visual "atmosphere". I heard that this was a technique pioneered by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, so I don't think the colour is ever going to be an exact match for what we see on the screen, but what I have created does look like the brickwork that I have seen in real life in England. The Vincent Van Gogh museum in Nuenen also has a number of bricks (plus red ones) that are similar.

Passes, speed and power

After several tests, only changing one variable at a time, I have settled on 75% power and 5mm per second for cutting. The number of passes depends on the material I am cutting: 6 passes guarantees a clean cut for my 2mm MDF and 5 passes for the lower density 3mm MDF.   It is possible to go with one less pass for each material, but the cut sometimes leaves a few tiny bits of MDF that need trimming with a sharp knife.

Progress on House 3

I have been busy all week (2-3 hours every night) designing all the various aspects of House 3. It has been a real challenge figuring out the millimetre perfect detail for each external and internal wall, the positioning of windows and doors, and especially the roof and brickwork. I think that I have almost finished, other than to work on the dormer window and chimneys. Once I have done that, I am going to take the plunge and start cutting everything out. I am reasonably confident that it will all fit together perfectly on the first attempt, but...we'll see!