Model Making: Laser Cut Fortified Tower House

After playing around with the various sci-fi fortifications and gantry systems I felt it was about time that I tried something a little more historical.

A friend of mine suggested I have a look at doing a Peel Tower and so after a little time doing some research (i.e. Google-fu) I settled on creating a tower based on the Tower of Hallbar. Not an accurate historical model, but taking the main points of the building and incorporating them into my design.

The following photos are the result. The model is built for 28mm figures and stands around 370mm high.

 

As part of the project it was important to hide the way the model was constructed, fortunately with the larger stones at the corners, it was possible to create an interlocking design that gave the model great strength as well as reasonably hiding the joins.

The actual stonework on the faces of each wall was created simply by drawing white splodges on a black background to create a very simple stone built effect. This was then repeated over the surface of each piece. The laser engraving of the stone pattern was a very slow process. The whole cutting and engraving took between 3 and 4 hours. If I removed the surface engraving, it would bring it down to around 30 minutes.

In these photos you can see that the roof tiles are actually sloped for each row of tiles. This was done by creating a black to white gradient for each row of tiles. Then using a special 3D setting on the laser cutter that cuts to certain depths depending on the different gradients of black through grey to white.

After I completed the basic tower I decided it would be interesting to a small turret, as seen on several other Peel towers. Now, the problem here is that the laser cutter will only cut flat material. All I could do was cut each ring of bricks as a separate piece and then glue them together. It worked well enough, but I wouldn’t want to have to do it for a turret that was the full height of the building…

Now clearly this model has quite diverse uses, everything from Boarder Reivers games through to fantasy battles and beyond. However the main problem with producing this tower as a saleable item is the time it takes on the machine. The stone effect is very nice, but it simply makes the model uneconomic to produce.