I just received from TheXLC my rewards from their November Kickstarter project. I received two building kits made from 3mm thick, laser cut MDF: a vehicle workshop, and an admin building.
Their terrain comes pre-printed and ready to assemble. They developed a technique where they print onto a substrate, laminate it to a 3mm MDF panel, apply a protective covering, and then laser cut. This allowed them to produce printed components without scorching to any of the printed surfaces.
The other night I assembled the vehicle workshop. The kit consisted of 16 MDF parts. It came with exploded diagrams for assembly. The model building went together easily; the parts fit well, and I only needed white glue. The hardest part was peeling off the protective covering. One has to take care not to also remove the printed substrate. The tip of a very sharp knife should suffice.
The printed details are nice. The corrugated siding is rendered clearly. There is some shadowing around the garage door edges, rust stains from the AC units, broken/missing pieces of siding, and appropriate warning signs. The windows and doors are all scored, so you could cut them out very easily if you wanted to.
The only real downside is the lack of printing on the edges where the MDF is keyed together. Not a bad trade off, considering that you don't really need to prime, paint and weather the model.
The manufacturer recommends that one leave the roof unglued if you want to use the interior for gaming, which interior comes already primed gray! For this particular kit, there would not be enough structural integrity, so I glued the two roof pieces on. There is no floor, so you could still place figures inside the building during a game, especially if you used light card or construction paper to outline the floor plan.
I could add some more highlights, weathering, and do something about those scorched edges. Even as-is, I think the model makes a neat addition to my growing collection of terrain for modern and sci-fi skirmish games.
"Sedition Wars Project mini-update: TheXLC Pre-printed MDF Terrain"
2 Comments -
Wow, that looks awesome, Dave! Looking forward to an SW game!
February 20, 2015 at 3:00 PM
Pre-painted terrain - that is my kind of terrain!
February 23, 2015 at 9:27 AM