My Potemkin Village
 

I've been putting these scale buildings together for a while. They are made from cardboard boxes and all fold down flat for storage and transport. Some of them have made it to a DAK battle in Arizona,and I hope to take all of them to a battle in San Diego or El Monte as well. They are made to be sort of generic, not any particular era or location, and are a bit cartoonish just for fun, but they give me the ability to battle in a village setting any place tankers want to battle. I picked the name Potemkin because of the old Russian legend from the era of Catherine the Great that describes villages that move. My village is movable just like the legendary one.
Here is my Potemkin village...
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https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...c233d68cc4.jpg
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I remember when you first started working on these and you sure have come a long way. They're looking really good. The two I like best are the little house with the porch in the first photo, and the brick building with the two arches in the front. Let me know when you put these up for sale, I'll probably pick up a few.

Thanks! The little house in the first picture is modeled after a Russian Isba, though I did not do a thatched roof, and the brick one with the arches is the bank.

Selling these? I don't have any idea what they would be worth. Lets see...
I bet every human on Earth and on the space station is within 100 feet of a cardboard box, so the box it's self has little or no worth, the glue and paint for each one cost perhaps $1.00, some have wood I bought, adding another $1.00, and of course, my time and creative talents, perhaps worth another $1,000,000.00 or so, add in the shipping cost, that puts the selling price in the $1,000,000.00 plus range, and how many do you want?

Seriously, these things are worthless to sell as a "product", but while we are stuck at home, this is a great way to use up hobby time for next to free. I bet everybody who reads this thread could make a cardboard box house this week for less than $5.00

Anybody who does, can post there efforts here.

Do you think you could put together a little video tutorial? And Greg, you really need to get Skype, so that we can do video chat. If you don't want to do a video tutorial, we could get together on Skype and you could show me how you make them and then I could make the video for you. I think they're really great little buildings and I think if you offered them for sale they would sell pretty good. Yeah, everybody has a cardboard box, but not everybody has the time or the talent to make something as nice as what you have here. I would definitely be more interested in buying a couple than trying to make them myself. I've got so many projects on the shelf right now that I'm sure I'll never get to all of them before death. Hell, I didn't even have time to build my own cckw, I had to get a friend of mine in Colorado to do it. (Wink, wink)

Really cool buildings! My favorite is the machine shop, how did you get the textured outside walls of the machine shop building? It looks like stucco walls.
Larry

I will work on a "how to" movie so other people can make them too. I do have the window and door stickers you see on some of them for sale, but it's not a "business'. If anybody wants some of those stickers, PM me.

The stucco texture is drywall mud painted on with a paint brush. I'm working on finding easy good looking textures and architectural features for them.

The roofs are made from 1/8 inch MDF, or "particle board" as most people call it. I glue cardboard to the two pieces of MDF to act as a hinge so it folds flat.

Here are some of them deployed to Arizona for a DAK event. Yes, that is a real B-17 in the background.
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...82ca3ff057.jpg

Very nice ! You should call them Potemkin Plus because yours are just more then the facade! ;). I hope to see them if you take them to San Diego.

A step up in durability (and cost) would be to use Sintra Board. It is like Foam Core, but the foam core is firmer and the facing is sheet plastic, not paper.

https://www.gator-board.com/sintra-board.htm

I ran across a model railroad program that is allows you to assemble and print buildings from photo elements. It actually scaled up to 1/16 pretty well. I figure I could print the files and put a matte laminate over it.


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.rcu...029c58d2b7.jpg

Thanks! That is nice material, but it costs money. Amazon delivered two of those buildings to me with Christmas presents inside them, and two others were fished out of dumpsters. All the others I got for free somehow too. I could build scale buildings that would rival Panzer Paul's for fine detail, but these particular buildings were designed to be cheap to make out of materials we all have easy access to. A cardboard box, some glue, paint, and time.

Price point is a big deal. I sometimes get access to used sintra from old trade show booths. I was thinking primarily for its durability and resistance to water. It is also heavier than cardboard, so if you have big village, it will weigh more.

SCAT had some nice buildings but they were always stored at the house hosting the battlefield. Any structure for San Diego would need to be portable like yours.

DAK has made great use of our "gifted" buildings and my personal favorite is the wrecked building that folds! We recently used them during our "washout" in feb when we had to move inside. These Items have been invaluable to adjusting our fields on the fly!

Cool. Glad you like them and use them. Yeah, that origami burned out building is one of my favorites too.
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