"building storage" Topic

just looking to pick people's brains, so any help or suggestions welcome…

I'm thinking of making or putting together 28mm scale historical urban terrain for the period 1890-1940 (Victorian through to Pulp!); enough to make a least a street to a block or so.

The main thing I would like though is to be able to obtain buildings that can be stored using as little storage space as possible. I'm guessing that I'm not alone in that given how much space figures and other wargames stuff takes up generally!

Does anyone know if there are there any buildings available that can be easily deconstructed for storage so that they can be stored flat when not in use?

There are some decent looking paper models out there, mainly made for model railway enthusiasts, but these might prove insufficiently sturdy for wargames use, and are unlikely to be able to be stored flat once they have been made.

A similar thing could be said regarding the assembly of the many very good MDF buildings that area also commercially available.

Has anyone, for instance, come across any 'Clip together' type buildings that could be dis-assembled for better storage, or anything at all similar?

Thanks in advaance for your ideas or suggestions…

I've been looking for clip together or fold flat myself, with minimal results. If I were starting from scratch, it would be PDF glued to foamboard without bases, which should with a little luck and care let me stack them inside one another like matryoshka dolls. (Plan B is to give them internal bases for sturdiness, so they can be just dumped loose into a container, and just concede the space of two big plastic tubs. That's what I evolved into.)

I've been working on fold flat for SF, and I think you could get decent results in your period with practice, but not for roofs, so space would be reduced but not negligible, the practice would take time, and there'd be the additional set-up time of getting the right roof on the right building.

If terrain-makers really loved us, buildings would come in standard dimensions, and bridges would be made to work with roads and rivers.

Maybe it's the road and river makers that are truly at fault….

It sounds like you might want to look at Plasticville buildings for a start. Snap together buildings 1/48 scale/O guage.

These are clip-together but probably too fantasy:

link

DBDD

Thinking outside the box (shape of buildings) – how about these 2.5D ones:

TMP – Jim Getzes 2.5D buildings

Pdf glued onto foam-board would work great – perhaps use cocktail-sticks or similar to stand-up on bases.

(PS if the buildings are low-relief (thin) then there would be more room on the table for roads)

Oh, I'm not saying any one of them's at fault, Yellow Admiral. And I've pretty well solved the problem in my own case. But I think there's an opening in the hobby for a company which makes roads, bridges and rivers so if they don't work together it's your own fault.

I've a particular distaste for the bridge with buttresses but no base so you can't butt the river sections against it, and if you rest it on the river you have troubles with the banks. Every time I get one of those, I have to build a suitable base, which gets old.

Fat Dragon has some stuff that might work for pulp…

link

Paper Terrain has a couple limited options…

link

Wargame Vault has a nice police station by a company called Pulp Places. There's likely some other stuff to be had there as well if you search…

link

Can't forget about Worldworks…

link

Battle Systems Urban Apocalypse…

link

Interesting MDF options at Gadzooks Gaming…

link

Interesting one-off requiring scale up printing

scenerybuilder.wordpress.com

These guys sell HO and O scale, but have some nice stuff, you could downscale the O a bit, and they have a lot of nice textures for some DIY

clevermodels.squarespace.com

I stumbled across a perfect resource last night before I saw this post that I STILL can't "refind"…super frustrating.

Check your cookie files (and narrow them down looking at the date/time), should get you in the ballpark of the sites you visited… ;-)

Great guidance, @Zephyr1. Unfortunately (in this type of case), I have my browsers set to entirely clear their caches every time I close them out. Rather tinfoil hat behavior, but I gotta be me (even when it hurts). 😀

These buildings are good for urban 19th/early 20th century, and thiugh intended for building on foamcore could easily be made in fold-down cardstock
link

Matakishi's Simple WWII buildings are made out of cork to a standard base size, and those taller than 2 stories stack.

Matakishi Simple WWII Buildings: link

Matakishi Cork Basics: matakishi.net/cork.html

Read this thread as I was at a bit of a loose end. You could try fold flat. Our buildings are not suitable but you could get an Idea from the pics.

link

You can use cereal boxes (that's how we started) as they have good folds, sprayed with an acrylic primer they can then be painted up and roof's can be added. Ours are fixed one side and have tabs to locate the other side and keep the boxes square.

Very cheap, very simple and VERY compact. They can last a long time, some of our 25nn ones are still around and they were printed using a Dot matrix printer.

For large scales you would have to use cereal boxes. Our stuff (1/72) requires 300 gsm card but for very heavy 28mm and above its pushing it a bit. cereal packets are thicker but have special complex creases, creasing ordinary card much above 300gsm tends to break rather than fold.