Lunch break MDF building - Dave's Wargames

Needed a brief sanity break from computers, so I spent my lunch break putting together one of Dave's Wargames' 15mm Normandy buildings I picked up a couple of Herewards ago. His buildings (in both 15mm and 28mm) are available from his eBay store, or from The Sleeping Dragon Hobby Shop, who by a useful coincidence will be at the show this Sunday.

Nice kit - pretty much the perfect compromise between MDF tabs so loose they won't stay together without quick-setting glue, elastic bands and swearing, and fitting so tight you have to force them. These are for the most part a pretty perfect interference/press fit, which means that a lot of joins will hold themselves together till the glue dries. (Sarissa run the next closest - a lot of their tabs are unfortunately just a hair too tight, meaning you either need to apply a fair bit of force, file them down (which usually results in them becoming sloppy) or risk the top 'skin' of the MDF delaminating if you don't force it exactly right.)

Also? The neatest designed MDF house chimney I've come across - three layers that fit together to form a square chimney with an actual hole - basically, the middle layer has two 'fingers' to form the sides, the other two are solid to form the ends. AND the house has a chimney breast!

Full marks (and this is a big bugbear of mine when folks get it wrong) for making the building floors big enough to hold a Flames of War medium base. Some companies, who should know better, don't, often because they downscale from 28mm to 15mm and don't think about it.

The one real irritation is that one pair of roof cross-supports was missing. Whether this is a design flaw or I just managed to lose them sometime in the past two years, I dunno - there certainly wasn't space for them on the sprue. The design of the rest actually meant that the small triangular ones were enough to hold it to shape, but it would have been nice to have the lower down cross-pieces (see arrow on diagram) to hold it a bit stiff and plug the holes. The latter I achieved by filling them with some tabs salvaged from bits of the MDF sprue: fortunately Dave designs almost all his tabs the same length, so they fitted rather neatly.

I also had a very minor gripe that the parts weren't as easily separable from the sprue as I'd like, and in some cases left bits that needed a little filing. However, remember this kit is a couple of years old, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover it's improved since.

All in all? A nice little building. I shall tile it and paint it up in a bit.