I glued the sheet of paper with the templates onto a 2mm sheet of plastic card.
Fearing the drill would rip the paper of the plastic (which it indeed did), I scored all the lines first, used a pin to transfer the center holes onto the plastic, then drilled the holes.
As… ahm… clearly mentioned before, this was of course only prototyping, not a real production run… ahem…
As Eric over on the Oldhammer forum pointed out, the 7mm holes in an 8mm square might turn out problematic. I did drill the holes, before actually cutting the squares out of the sheet, still… I obviously don't have the serious skill needed… Some of the holes merged. I guess I did not hit the centers good enough, and with little margin there was, that being slightly off overlapped with the next hole, which probably also wasn't center enough.
With all the pieces (I did not even bother with the roof squares), I used Tamiya plastic cement and assembled the pieces.
As by now it was clear this was not working out as expected, I wasn't too concerned about neatness.
Couple issues:
- The roofs fit lengthwise to the slanting parts of the walls. But, I did not take into account their thickness, so I free-handed a chamfer to fit them in, need to give this issue some thought.
- I glued the outer box first, then tried to glue the inner walls in, then the roof. Need to reverse that. First the inner construction, then the roof (to be able to reach it from the underside when trying to slide it in place) then the outer box around that.
Otherwise, the design basically turned out as exptected.
When I placed the Dark Angles Captain (which I painted in the 90's… ) besides the structure, it seemed a bit small. So I took another shot, also with a 'normal' Marine (also late 90's or early 2000's…) without exaggerated helmet ornaments,
to try and compare it with the size from the original photo:
My structure seems a bit small to me, so version 2 will be slighty larger. Which should hopefully also solve some of the drilling holes issues, if I keep the holes the same size.
Just as a starting point, I think I will go with the assumption that the original image was with 25mm models, mine are rather 28mm, so with a factor of 1.12; considering today's miniatures are 32mm, perhaps also with 1.28, or 1.25 which is a nicer looking factor.
Next step will definitely first be a paper mock to check the size.
Any other comments and advice welcome.