The other day I went to a local gun show looking for a new grouse gun. I did not find one but I did buy an interesting book. It was "The Illustrated Directory of Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment of the Civil War". The book is Edited by David Miller and is published by Salamander Books Ltd., 8 Blenheim Court, Brewery Road, London N79NT, United Kingdom.

If you are just starting out in the American Civil War wargaming period this would be an ideal reference book. It is small, but thick, measuring 4 1/2" by 8 1/2" and is over 1" thick. A great wealth of detailed information is provided all in color. The book covers everything you need to know about the period and how to paint it for an ACW army. If you would go out and buy every Osprey Civil War title you would not have as much information as this book provides. The nice thing is the price. I paid $8.00 for my copy. I am not exactly sure where to get other copies but it is very similar to books on other topics that I have seen at Barnes and Nobel. That would be a good place to start.

BUILDING THOSE BUILDINGS

Ever since I started wargaming, I have enjoyed trying to put together a battlefield that closely represents the historical landscape. My Civil War library has numerous volumes of photographic histories. Each battle is researched to see if I can find photos of the actual buildings that were located on the battlefield. Buildings are then made or found to come as close as possible to the historical buildings. This would be something that a gamer would never take the time to do, but a historical gamer will take pride in the look and feel of the battlefield even if he is the only one that recognizes the research. For my Fredricksburg game I decided to have a large part of town on the game board. No sane reason for this! Just wanted to see what a large Civil War Town would look like on the table.

There was quite a bit of Civil War photographs of the town so a fairly accurate representation could be made. Normally, for my wargames, I try to down scale the building scenery. As I game in 25mm, I make my buildings in 20mm. This allows for more buildings to fit in a small area and the difference in figure scale and building scale does not clash. At least it doesn't bother me.

One of the better sources for 20mm gaming buildings would be through Musket Miniatures. The buildings have a nice size to them and the pricing is quite reasonable. However, for Fredricksburg, I ran into a problem. I needed lots of buildings (20-25) and many needed to be brick. There were no brick buildings available so I was forced to build my own. The method that I ended up using worked pretty good. A building could be made ready for painting in two hours and ended up costing $4-6.

These project buildings do not take a lot of skill. If your are comfortable putting a plastic model together and can use an X-acto knife without cutting off any figures, then you can get through this without any problems. Putting the buildings together is exactly like putting a model together, the only difference is that you have to first make the pieces for your model. 

Material for the buildings are readily available, at any model or hobby shop. Your will need a cutting knife, straight edge, cement for plastic models and pieces of sheet Styrene plastic. First start by making templates of the building sides. These can be made from tablet cardboard using existing buildings for the measurements. I made templates for one, one and half and two story buildings. These will save a lot of time as you make your buildings and will also keep the size of the buildings uniform and in scale. For most of my buildings I use 45 degrees for the slope of the roof. Steeper roofs can be made if desired.

With the templates, trace out the various sides of the buildings on the Styrene plastic. Your can buy almost any kind of siding for the type of buildings your want. Sheets come in various scales and can be found in brick, wood siding, stucco and various styles and types of stone. These sheets are available from Evergreen Scale Models and Plastruct. I usually work on two building at the same time. The glue dries fairly fast and by doing two building at once there is no down time waiting for parts to dry.

After cutting our your building sides, it is necessary to cut in the door and window opening. You have several options for doors and windows. Model railroading supply catalogs have long lists of many scales and styles of millwork for houses. These are a little pricey and can cost up to 25 to 50 cents per item. A less expen sive way is to find building kits, in the scale that you want, that have a large quanity of win dows and doors. I found some in my scale that had double the number of windows necessary for the building kit. It ended up being cheaper to buy the whole kit even though I never in tended to use the actual kit building for anything. I remember putting together a large western town using buildings from Model Power. These kits came with 100's of extra windows which I kept for future use.

Mark out your window and door opening and cut out with and X-acto knife. One thing I did to speed up the building process was to put no windows or doors on one side of the building.

The sheet Styrene that you make the sides from is quite flexible. To stiffen up the sides I glued a backer sheet of Styrene to each side. This step strengthens up the side wall nicely. You can easily add a foundation to you building during this step. If you want your building to have a foundation, such as brick or stone you can glue a strip to the bottom of each side matching up the side and foundation on the backer sheet. Cut the sides from the backer sheet. This can be done with your modeling knife.

To the corner edges of two opposite sides, your need to install plastic pieces (3/16"x3/16") These will make it much easier and give more strength to the building when you glue the sides together. The windows should have a backer piece glued to them to prevent looking into a empty house. If the windows are thin then the strengthening backer will serve. If the windows are thick and stick out from the inside of the walls, a small piece of plastic should be glued to the inside of each window.

Now you can glue the sides of the building together. It works best if you let this dry overnight. A typical Civil War era home would have 2-4 chimneys as the entire house would have been heated by fireplaces. Make your chimneys out of square hollow plastic stock. Your can buy square or rectangle pieces. Then cut to proper length, depending if the chimney will be on the outside of the house or on inside walls. Glue brick siding to two opposite sides. After this dries you can trim the brick to match the plastic core pieces. Then glue on the other two sides and trim after they dry. The finished chimney can then be glued onto either the outside or inside of the gable wall depending on the style of chimney you built

Next comes the roofing. Again you can buy sheets of almost any type of roofing that houses are made with. I used wood shake roofs on my ACW buildings. You will need to cut two sections of roofing making sure to leaving enough overlap on the gables and sides. Make sure you cut away the proper section to clear your chimneys. It is much easier to glue on the roof if you add pieces of plastic to the gable sides and installing a piece along the ridge line. This gives a much stronger and wider edge to glue the roof on. Small pieces of plastic can be glued onto the ridge to finish off the roof.

This will complete a basic four sided house. You can add offsets such as sheds or small additions by using the same techniques. They just add a little more time to the construction. Some of my roofs were done with a mansard construction. For this I cut out the angled roof using wood on a table saw. I then glued the roofing plastic to the wood using epoxy glue. If you have added a foundation to the building, you will have to add some steps and maybe a porch. Pieces of Styrene will work for these quite nicely.

PAINTING THOSE BUILDINGS

After completing your building, some painting will finish it off. I start by spraying a black primer coat, using Plastic-Kote Automotive primer. This give the plastic a good base for using acrylic paints. Whatever primer you use, make sure you test it on a sample piece of plastic. Some paint can react and melt styrene plastic. For the sides and the roof I basically use a dry brush technique using a fairly large brush and 2-4 coats of dry brushing.

Many of the houses for my Fredricksburg battle had brick siding. I use a cinnamon apple color from Apple Barrel Colors for the brick. This is a kind of rosy red color. After dry brushing about 3-4 coats I add some highlights to various scattered bricks. I ended with a pretty realistic looking soft brick color. Roofs were dry brushed using 2 or 3 colors of browns or grays. For windows and doors I used white, light brown, green and burgundy for trim. It seemed to blend in nicely. For the window glass panes I use two techniques. One, I left the window in the black primer, while the other I painted the glass using silver paint with a small dab of blue to make an almost gun barrel blue color. I then added a few streaks of white to represent shinning glass. Both techniques work pretty well.

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