A Mighty Fortress in the New World!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while; with Oldhammer Day coming up in August and real life obligations, I've been too busy to sit down and write a proper blog post. So, without further ado I bring you...

BULLDOG'S MODELLING DOGHOUSE!!!

I recently managed to get my hands on a Mighty Fortress! For those of you not in the know, Citadel made a styrofoam Mighty Fortress back in the 80's that I've wanted to get my hands on since I first saw one.

You can read a little background info on the Mighty Fortress set at Stuff of Legends.

I haven't really seen very many examples of completed kits on the internet, and I admit I was stuck on how I wanted to put mine together but then.....

Oh yeah. That's right. What's mightier than Greyskull? Nothing. Duh.

Now obviously I wasn't going to make a replica of Greyskull, the towers in the kit are square and I wanted to have a large courtyard area. So, I dug through my bitzbox for skull bits and ordered a foam skull on Amazon. My idea was to mount the fortress on 2" foam, build up the sides with plaster rocks, and embellish the kit with skulls. So here are the materials I used (besides the fortress)

24 x 36  2" insulation foam
24 x 36  1/8" MDF
5lb tub of Hyrocal (plaster)
Rock molds from Woodland Scenics
Plaster Cloth from Woodlnd Scenics
Liquid Nails all purpose adhesive
1 Styrofoam Halloween skull
Dungeon Decor bits from Mega Miniatures
Wood filler for filling gaps

I started by cutting a rough platform out of the 2" foam, leaving enough room for the plaster rocks and then attaching it to the MDF board. I had to place weights on top of the foam overnight as it takes about 24 hours for the liquid nails to dry. Next I attached the fortress pieces to the foam over the course of a few days. I did this slowly because I wanted sections to dry completely before attaching the next few sections.

I attached the metal skulls to the gate section prior to attaching it to the foam. The picture above is a test fit. I filled in the hollow area behind the skulls with milliput and let it dry before attaching the gate section. You can also see the large Halloween skull attached to a parapet made from a spare wall section. I had to cut the skull to fit the contours of the parapet. Always be careful not to cut away too much when making these kinds of cuts, its easier to cut away in increments than it is to figure out how to fill in stuff you shouldn't have cut away.

Once most of the fortress sections were attached, I started attaching the plaster rocks. You can see how I have filled in the hollow skulls with milliput.

Once the rocks were all attached, I started applying strips of plaster cloth to build up a base for the ground, and to fill in the spaces in between the rocks. I also started filling in gaps with wood filler. Once everything is dry I will sand down the rough patches and apply a coat of plaster to the fortress pieces and the ground. The fortress coat will be very light but will serve to unify the texture of all the fortress components. I will the apply a thicker coat of plaster and some modelling sand on top of the plaster cloth sections to create the ground.

I plan on having this ready for Oldhammer in the New World (OHITNW) in a few weeks, so I am working as fast as possible to have this ready for our WHFB table. For more information on OHITNW, check out Blue's blog post here, or check out Airbornegrove's post here.

Next time: PAINTING THIS SUCKER!!!