Terrain- Water Tower

Water Tower

This is my first completely scratch built piece of scenery. After Christmas, I had my MDF church to be getting on with, but had my eye on something else amongst all of the gifts from family and friends. Someone had given me some salted caramel truffles in a round cardboard tubing box. As I opened and closed it my mind kept going to a piece of terrain I'd seen on a blog by another wargamer and modeller- a water tower!

John Bond is a very talented guy from Australia. His blog took me to new levels of possibility when I stumbled on it looking at his scratch built rivers. I've made no rivers yet, but have enjoyed reading his posts and poring over the pictures. His water tower can be found here.

So, with some excellent inspiration and a suitable piece to experiment with, I had a go. I glued the lid of the truffle box to the top of the interior section- it normally slid down flush with the base. The 'lid' would become the water tank upper, and the 'base' would make the tower itself.

I'd printed off some examples of brick paper that I'd found online and thought this would be a good chance to try some of it out. I imagined the base of the tower would be bare brick and the 'tank' would be metal sheeting. I clad the exterior of the tank with rectangular plates and added two run-off pipes to the interior of the tank itself. The door and side access hatch were made from coffee stirrer 'planks', as were the frames for each of these. The depth gauge is a strip of cardboard painted with measurement guides. The ladder is two cardboard strips with curved tops for the sides and then cocktail stick rungs cut and glued to make the ladder itself. Final details included the Dubonnet advertisement and a seafoam tree. Finally, I coated the water in Vallejo water effect to give it a nice sheen.