HowTo: Building a tower - Part 1

Again I'm keeping one of my promises, I start the second planned series of my HowTo's. Today I will talk about building a  tower from scratch.
As you have seen in my other HowTo's I like building terrain pieces from spare parts or even garbage. But in this case all my thoughts about how I could achieve a decent result failed. Therefore I started planning a complete building from scratch. Thanks to some research and one REALLY good tutorial from Gidian Gelände, the concept grew fast. So I collected the needed material and started to experiment with things I had never done before (again).

Chips and Selitron

Step 1 - Building the core construction

For the first step you need a paperboard tube, e.g. from chips and a material called Selitron or the like. Since Selitron is not sold at my hardware stores in the area (and by ordering is WAY too expensive) I searched for an alternative. What I used for the building is a noise-absorbent mat for laminate floors. Overall this is pretty cheap (I think I paid arround 18 euro for a lifetime package and shared it with a friend of mine) and has nearly the same material properties as Selitron.

Measure the circumference and the height of the tube and cut the Selitron to the appropriate size. Then carefully bend the Selitron to a tube starting from a wide circle and getting smaller. This is needed that the Selitron will not loosen itself in the gluing process. If the Selitron stays in this form, you can start glueing it to the paperboard tube. Fix it in this position until it is completly dry! I used some hair tie to achieve this. In the end it should look like this:

Glued Selitron on paperboard tube

Then I cut out the door and made an experiment with carving the stone structure into the Selitron. For this I used an old (not sharpened) pencil. With some soft (be gentle guys I mean real soft) pressure you can carve in the pattern you wish. I tried to make a small doorway and a wooden door. The wood grain is achieved by making carving different depths and lenghts into the Selitron. Then I cut out the door and kept this small piece for later usage.

Carving in some stone and wood patterns

Fortunately we had a real sunny and calm sunday so I took the opportunity and carved the complete stone structure into the tower. With a good beer, some good music and my lovely wife to talk to, this otherwise boring process was a real pleasure. Surprisingly I was really relaxed afterwards (perhaps this came from the beer and the sun :-) ). It took me about two and a half hours to finish this step, the complete opposite to my usual terain pieces.

Completely carved and ready to paint

The core is now ready to paint. But this is a different story, which will follow in the next part of this series.

Hope you enjoyed it so far.

So long,
Paradox0n


P.S: As with my gaming board series I attach the links to all parts of the HowTo: Build a tower series on each part if you missed one:
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 1
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 2
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 3
HowTo: Building a tower - Part 4