Sunday, September 11, 2011

Captain's Log... Product Review...

http://www.warmill.co.uk/

I'm going to show some close up pictures and some opinion on a fortress I purchased from a company called WarMill.

First though, I want to give credit where it is due. WarMill has a presence on Dakka Dakka and I am not trying to move in on any of their success or the success of WarMill in starting their company. I'm just an average guy calling it as I see it.



From the first picture you can see that the set I bought comes with directions on how to put the fotress together. I won't bore you with a bunch of pcitures of them but will say they are good. The book shows an oblique picture for assemply and finding pieces is fairly easy.

The gate was a bit complicated but after a few minutes of looking at the picture and the piece I was working on it made sense.

The entire set is made out of 3mm MDF which is obviously cut with some sort of 'laser' type cutter. I'd say that 95% of the cuts were great and most just fell out of place. I had a few that did not go all the way through and suggest to any that buy this product to inspect the cuts and have a very sharp hobby knife on hand. It was tough to cut but I took my time and it was well worth the patience to cut just a little at a time.


The Gate



The gate comes in two pieces. Shown is only one portion being the mirror of the other section. The sliding door is tight. I actually think I'm gonna sand it down before I paint the set so it's a bit loose.


This is a side veiw (Well duh CK!) of the gate. You will notice the gap on the top of the tower wall. It's loose unlike most of the peices that fit together. WarMill says the set is modular and breaks down but I think over time it will just get looser and looser. I'm going to lightly glue pieces and then paint.





The Wall



If you go to the Warmill site the fortress can be ordered with a couple of options for the 'style' of reinforced armour on the front of the walls, towers, etcetera. Picture here is the basic reinforcment. All the small pieces came out easily enough but I did use a mechanical pencil to punch out the tiniest of triangles in the middle of each section.





Outside Corner



Each corner has four of these angled wall pieces to create a 90 degree angle. I presume that 'inside' corner pieces sold separately are just angled oppositely then the one pictured.

As a side note, I must mention that I would like to see WarMill picture the various pieces to get a better idea of what things look like when completed. Better pictures was something  I thought about each time I was at their site before purchasing the fortress.




The Tower




If you take a look at the picture above you will see tiny gaps at the top where the sides meet the front wall piece. The pieces hold but do slip slightly thus my thoughts of lightly gluing them.





Scale








I'm pretty sure we can all agree that the fortress is cool. I'm guessing though that people will want to know about the cost.

I ordered from the UK to Virginia in the US and it cost me roughly $29 USD. The set itself was about $150 USD. It can be very expensive for people on a budget. I was able to order it for my birthday otherwise I would have had to wait a few paychecks to get all the money together.

If anyone would like some more measurements or pictures just leave a comment and I will answer you questions next weekend.

Thanks for looking, I'll be in a corner trying to figure out some sort of 'counts-as' rune priest...

CK

2 comments:

  1. Great start Captain,

    I will be watching this closely :)

    CS

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  2. Hi, Warmill here!

    Thanks for the review, we appreciate all the comments. Better pictures are something we're aware of, unfortunately our sitebuilder resizes all our huge pics to 500x500 which is a little annoying! A new photo session and link to external gallery are on the cards!

    Thanks again
    Harry and Ed - Warmill

    ReplyDelete