Hopefully this post is allowable under the new rules…
The Lodestone buildings are a new, and in my opinion, very clever concept. Their Kickstarter ended a year or so ago, and the products were delivered more or less on time this summer. Right now you can't buy these even if you wanted to, but there are plans for a webstore and a second KS (no date or further information available at this time. And yes, I have encouraged them to become advertisers here on TMP when they launch their webstore and/or next KS. With all that aside, onto the product.
I went all in on this one and got the whole "Village" package, 9 buildings in all. I got the "Fantasy version with all red roofs (grey and green were also options). I am going to paste part of the first of 5 blog posts here, and then link to that and the four that follow.
I think this is a superb idea, and very well executed. Anyway, I am going to start with one of the simplest buildings, the Single Storey House.
Opening the carton, here are the components, all packed with great care!
All removed and and unpacked, there is a Medium Basic Box (upper right); these boxes, with there inserted rare earth magnets, are the key to the whole Lodestone concept. They form the basis of the structures, to which the outsides or "skins" of the buildings are attached, using said magnets. This being one of the smaller buildings, the Lodestone guys used the extra space in the carton for some, well, extras – two chimneys, some alternate "storefront" skins, and a small envelope containing parts for shutters, made from greyboard.
The skins themselves are made of MDF, with a bonded white "stucco" pattern attached, and overlaid with wooden "timbering"; other details are made of greyboard. Note especially the quite exquisite detailing of the "leaded" windows! The skins attach with great ease; even the first time, it takes less than a minute to assemble a building!
Lookin' good already!
When in doubt, "green" sides always attach to "red" sides, and vice versa!
Done!
Additional view.
With the optional chimney attached, once again, magnetically!
The leftover parts are the mentioned extras for a few other larger buildings. We will come back to them later!
The buildings look pretty darned good just as assembled right out of the carton, but… I decided tio paint the wood work dark brown, using this building as a trial case.
Yep, even better; by the way, I used very inexpensive Craftsmart paint from Michaels, their dark brown, "Expresso", which is a bit thin on pigment intensity, but perfect here as it acts almost like a stain. It also happens to be a very close match for the dark brown color of the laser cut edges of the skins and the "timbers", so I don't have to paint those at all, really.
Yep, definitely worthwhile; I will be painting the woodwork on all the buildings in a similar fashion.
Very effective, I think.
Works fine with the chimney added, too.
How about them shutters? I was a bit uncertain as to how to assemble them (each has a frame and the shutter itself), and where and how to attach them. A question on the Lodestone Kickstarter site brought not just an answer, but a video illustrating the construction in less than 24 hours! Here they all are assembled, which took a couple of hours at most to do them for all nine buildings.
Being very pleased with the results of painting the timbers, I painted the doors and shutters, in this case with Delta CC "Seminole Green". No way am, I touching the lattice work on the windows, but frankly, I think it would be hard to improve on how they look as is anyway.
Another side with a different door; the light grey base color of these parts helps tone down the color applied over it.
And yet a third style of door – lots out of escape routes from this cottage!I may give these green and brass parts a black was to further mute the colors and bring out some of the details.
Here's the whole village as assembled in less than an hour.
Here's all 9 buildings, after adding paint and the shutters.
For those interested in a lot more information and pictures, here are the five blog posts in order:
link
link
link
link
link
They already did Sci-Fi buildings, but imagine just adding skins to make Mediterranean/Spanish buildings, Russian buildings, Middle Eastern buildings, Northern European buildings, Oriental buildings, ACW era buildings, etc. Why not Castles, or even fortresses?
Lots of potential for expansion of their line in the future!
Peter
finds out what happens when Elves go bad...
