North African Buildings from Cork Floor Tiles

Hi all,

Here's a progress report on my latest terrain project. As I'm a massive fan of...

a) all things Matakishi (especially his cork buildings) and
b) cheap wargames terrain

...I decided to have a go at making some North African buildings from cork floor tiles.

Materials required:
1 x pack of 5mm cork floor tiles (contents 7 tiles)
1 x sheet of 3mm MDF
2 x lengths of balsa
1 x handful of popsicle sticks

Total cost: Approximately AU$20 or however many shekels that translates to ;-)

Equipment required:
PVA glue, pen, knives, pins, cutting mat and steel rules.

Time required:
Roughly 10 hours spaced over a week. 3/4 of that time was spent on the fort, at least some of which was just thinking / measuring / holding while glue dried.

Here's the result. A small settlement of four adobe houses, a mosque and a hill fort for use in colonial games for 28mm miniatures. Remember to click for bigger versions.

Hill Fort
The footprint is just over 30cm square, the tower is 20cm tall and the walls are about 13cm high on the outside. I tried to keep it as small as possible without looking silly. I want to be able to fit 20 miniatures inside comfortably.

I'm going to add a trap door to the tower for access to the top from inside, plus a ladder to the lower battlements. I'll also knock up "open", "closed" and "broken" sets of interchangeable gates for different circumstances.

Adobe houses (x4)
With the exception of the longer house these are approximately 12cm square. I have some offcuts left so I may add a few odd walls and maybe a side room or two on some to add variety.

Mosque
The mosque is roughly 20cm square and still needs a dome. Not sure what I'll use for that - probably a polystyrene sphere cut in half or some sort of plastic bowl.

I plan to give all the buildings a blast of white primer, base coat in a dirty off-white and then dry brush in several lighter shades. I'll also pick out the timber details, etc.

Comments and questions welcome.

Cheers,
Millsy