So last week I unexpectedly found myself with a free afternoon/evening with nothing to do. My better half was otherwise occupied and real life wasn't being particularly pushy so I realised I had the best part of 12 hours hobby time - a rare luxury indeed!

For whatever reason I didn't really fancy painting any figures so decided to embark on a scenery project I had been planning for some time.

I spent most of 2012 painting Rohan and Isengard figures with the aim of playing out a Huge Helm's Deep scenario last Christmas. That we did, using the GW kit and my old Warhammer fortress and it went really well, but I still wanted more, I still wanted a complete version of Helm's Deep done in the style of PJ's films.

So, I dug out my TTT DVDs, my laptop, BGIME 28-30, TTT Journey Book, a pad and pencil, tape measure and 5 A1 sheets of 5mm foam board I'd bought in the Hobbycraft sale a while back and got to work.

The Raw materials:



I decided to base my model on a combination of the one in The Two Towers Journey book and Battle Games in Middle Earth issues 28-30. I would assemble it like in the Journey book (hollow modular sections made out of foamboard) but take some design inspiration from BGIME (notably the corner towers).

My ultimate plan was to create a modular fortress that would resemble Helm's Deep but could also be put together in other combinations to play generic seige games around.

I also needed the fortress to fit in with the GW Helm's Deep model as that would save me having to build the curved walls and Gatehouse.

So, I stuck the movies on (hardly a chore) and started screenshotting my life away. It's hard to know exactly how long the next stage took due to dinner/tea breaks etc. but, 10 hours later or so, 4 of the A1 boards had been transformed into the plans you see below:



All in all, this should give me:

3 long wall sections (12" long)
1 long wall section with a culvert
2 short wall sections (6" long)
2 pieces of breached wall
4 large corner towers
1 small Deeping Wall Tower (you can see it to the far right of the Deeping Wall in the film)
1 Ascending wall section (this is the diagonal wall section that joins the Deeping Wall to the Hornburg)
2 Movable sets of stairs

This should give me a lot of choice when it comes to assembling the fortress. I'm not attempting to accurately recreate the Hornburg at this stage as I simply don't have the storage space that the larger walls/mountains/Keep would need. Instead I will have a long Deeping wall and a fair few other wall sections to create a Hornburg stand-in at the same height as the Deeping Wall - more than good enough for my needs! Perhaps at some point in the future I'll add a more accurate version of the Hornburg but for now that will have to wait.

Pretty pleased with myself I crawled off to bed. The next day I spent about 3 hours cutting the boards up and temporarily assembling a few pieces just to check my measurements had all been correct which they thankfully had.

So that's where I am so far, hopefully I'll be assembling the various sections over the next week or so, I honestly have no idea how long this project will take to complete but I hope by creating a WIP thread it'll at least encourage me to keep going with it!

Total project time so far: Approx 13 hours.

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Finished 2nd in the 2014 GBHL. My Wife's so proud

Free SBG fanzine: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29569

Ahhh Helms Deep... The board we all want but dont wanna build, lol
L:ooking forward to seeing how this turns out.
My Weathertop has came to a stand still, lol

Looking forward to this one Dr Grant, lucky man having 12 hours spare in one go!

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Harfoots-The first of the Hobbit people to cross over the Misty Mountains and enter Eriador.

You may find that this site will help for screenshots.
http://www.framecaplib.com/lotrlib/html ... humb54.htm

Best of luck with your fortress. I did one too, and it is a mammoth undertaking. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

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http://napoleonicstrategybattlegame.yolasite.com/

Wow brilliant web site, thanks i have just book marked it.

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Harfoots-The first of the Hobbit people to cross over the Misty Mountains and enter Eriador.

Thanks for the kind words all, much appreciated, hopefully I'll be able to pull it off!

And cheers for the link to the website Eggman, that's a fairly staggering resource, very handy indeed!

Anyhoo, work's continued apace and I've been assembling the various sections of the castle. Each piece is dry assembled using dressmaking pins to check everything fits well before being glued together with PVA. I'm also leaving the dressmaking pins in the model for extra stability, they fit in flush to the foamboard so they'll be covered up once the model is textured and painted.

Here's the parts that create a wall section:



And the assembled wall section next to part of the GW Helm's Deep for scale:



Here's the parts that make a tower:



And an assembled tower:



Here's the parts that created the small tower in the Deeping Wall (fiddly this one):



And the assembled tower (using Sellotape to hold the battlements together while the PVA dries):



I've also built a couple of freestanding staircases as shown below:



And the photo below shows how the end of the Deeping wall will meet the Hornburg via the small tower and ascending wall section.



So that shows how I've been doing, all in all each section took about half an hour to assemble so that's roughly another 7 hours project time.

The next stage is to slice through the 2 layers of battlement foamboard to produce the unique sloped Helm's Deep battlements (which I've already had a go at on the wall section). After that I'll be covering all the edges of each section with polyfilla to tidy them up, fun fun fun!

Approx total project time: 20 hours

_________________
Finished 2nd in the 2014 GBHL. My Wife's so proud

Free SBG fanzine: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29569

Looking great so far, keep it up!

Good work fella

Amazing. I'd love to eventually do this.

Helms deep- the one thing we all want to build but don't want to build