Windmills for Ligny

Our grand Ligny battle is now less than two weeks away. I’ve been building some windmills ready for the table, using the excellent Sarissa Precision models. These are easy to build and closely match contemporary illustrations of windmills. Now I didn’t want two exactly identical windmills, so I decided to customize them just a little bit…

The good thing about MDF is that it’s fairly easy to convert, certainly much easier than other modelling media such as resin. The first thing on my list was to improve the base. The provided sample is a little two dimensional for my tastes, so I simply added extra pieces of balsa wood to make it look sturdy. This could be done of course with off-cuts left over from building the model, I just happen to have some balsa lying around.

Next up: the roofs. Again, as I wanted an individual ‘look’ to each of them, I decided to redo them. For the first I used some of the roof tile material from Warbases. This does take a little time, but the effect is well worth it. You have to build up successive layers for the effect. It does just make the roof look that little bit more real. For the second windmill I decided to make wooden tiles, so simply cut them out at the right length and glued them down one after the other. Both of the roof surfaces now look sufficiently different from each other.

I added wooden paneling to the side of the one windmill, again to make it that little bit different from it’s twin. This too was very easy to do: simply cut the notches from the side of the existing model and cut strips of wood to fit the sides. This vertical paneling was inspired by pictures of windmills from the battle.

Now for the second one, I’d seen pictures of windmills on artificial mounds of earth and stone. So I decided to do away with the wooden supports and build my own mound made out of scraps of Craftfoam (good sturdy stuff!). With some decorative touches to the base, I’m sure it’ll look fine. There you go, some simple ideas on how to make your MDF windmills look a little bit different. Now I’ll get back to tiling the roof of La Haye Sainte!