Country Road Diorama Base

[Mike]

Country Road Diorama Base

1:35 MiniArt

Another cracking diorama base reaches us from the industrious folks at MiniArt. This one depicts a country road with a rather battered stone wall running alongside it. The kit arrives in a sturdy box, and the finished example is shown built and painted, with a tree, a broken down cart and plenty of static grass scattered about. Inside the box are two sheets of thick vacformed parts and one of injection styrene. The main components are vacformed on very thick grey styrene sheets, but don’t let that put you off at all. The styrene is so thick that when you’ve cut the parts out, they’ll be indistinguishable from injection moulded parts.

Firstly, the good news is that the cart is included, but the tree and grass aren’t, understandably. The cart is built up from the injection moulded sprue, and consists of a large number of parts (19 in total), and can be built in any state of deconstruction you want… the world is your oyster! Detail is good, and as usual with MiniArt, the wood texture is excellent, and the look of the finished item is authentic for the time period, and often seen being used by refugees fleeing from conflict.

Moving to the larger parts, the base is made from one vacformed part, and simply needs cutting from the backing sheet with a sharp knife, then snapping from the surround and sanding flat. The wall is double-sided, and made up from the two parts on the second vacformed sheet. Once cut out using the same method for the base, simply sand off the debris from the cutting process, and glue them together with ordinary styrene cement. Whether you add some internal tabs from scrap styrene is up to you, but it will probably help when it comes to filling the seam. Once built, the wall section glues to a flat on the base, which has a continuation of the wall at ground level to help it blend in.

The base is very well moulded, having lots of tyre and track prints running up and down the length of the road, with odd bits of masonry and wood strewn around the place. The addition of some static grass and a bit of sundry grit from mixed sand will bring it to life, but if you’re not comfortable with adding static grass, and as of writing I’ve not done it yet myself, the surface will still look good painted as a muddy area. You’ll need to remove a few moulding pips from the vacform parts of course, as they have been female moulded, so have small airways dotted around the mould to allow the vacuum to draw the styrene right into the mould.

Conclusion

I’m a big fan of these “almost ready” diorama bases, and plan on building one very shortly. It provides all the main elements for your work, and can be used as it stands, or with the addition of extra elements to personalise it. The styrene is strong enough for most purposes, but I might consider adding a piece of MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard) to the bottom of mine to add some weight to it, as it will be very light when built otherwise.

This is now a work in progress, and can be seen here.

Highly recommended.

Review sample courtesy of

[robw_uk]

looking at a diorama base that is versatile. Couldn't make this do North Africa but I guess both Eastern and Western Europe could be depicted.... seriously tempting....

[Mike]

I suppose it depends on whether you put green or sandy brown dry coloured grass down

[robw_uk]

I suppose it depends on whether you put green or sandy brown dry coloured grass down

true - I would also think a wall in NA would be a different (sandy) colour to a European one - more stone.... anyway 1 step at a time with armour....

[pigsty]

There was a lot of mud in North Africa in the winter, especially as the campaign moved into Tunisia. Don't be misled by the idea that it's always wall-to-wall sunshine over there.

As for the colour of the stone, there isn't one uniform "North African" colour, nor one uniform "European" colour. A much better approach is to pick your location and then research what the stone actually looks like locally, and check whether it can be used as building stone. On first impression that wall looks like it's made of stone that will cleave tidily in more than one plane, still with reasonably sharp edges, which makes it more like limestone than anything else. (As a coarse generalisation:- if it were granite, sandstone or gritstone the blocks would be the same shape, but with rounder corners; if it were slate, the blocks would still be sharp but would be much longer and shallower.) There's a lot of similar stone in the Cotswolds, which you can see used as dry-stone walls as well as in buildings.

Also, building stone (before you get onto weathering) may not look quite the same as the surface around it. Relatively little comes from the surface, which is where sand comes from; it's more likely to have been quarried (or even mined). This means it's quite possible for it to be a different colour from its surroundings. An extreme example is the pyramids of Egypt - many were faced in limestone that was chosen because it was nearly white and made them stand out against the desert. Dry-stone walls are different. They're generally made from loose rock picked up off the ground - in fact, often from rock cleared to make fields usable - so they're more likely to resemble the surface. But even then they may include odd erratics. This sort of thing is why I always advocate site-specific research.

[robw_uk]

Mike, the grass at the front, how man walking 1/35 figures do you think you could fit on it? or is there room to "park" a motorbike & sidecar? wondering about using this with a Stug, some german infantry or perhaps field police, to depict a move to the front during Operation Barbarossa..... do you think it could work?

[Mike]

Sorry Rob - didn't spot this til today Quick answer is yes... lots of space for figures or a motor car @ 1:35, or the wooden cart that's supplied with the set

This is how she looks at the moment. More work needed, it's just finding the time

[Dads203]

Will you be using this base for the lastest Armour project? doesn't look big enough to get the Tortoise on it?

[richellis]

How big is it? Got a 1:32 truck on the go that would suit that base

[Mike]

Will you be using this base for the lastest Armour project? doesn't look big enough to get the Tortoise on it?

I tried in place today, and it's just not quite big enough.

How big is it? Got a 1:32 truck on the go that would suit that base

Think of an A4 sheet, then make it wider. I'll get the proper dims for you later (should have put it in the review really).

[Wayne]

Thanks for the review Mike, that looks like a very nice little diorama. Your work on it so far is looking really good.

According to the MiniArt web site the diorama base is 244mm by 195mm. Take a look at http://miniart-model..._35_d/36047.jpg to see a large image of the box with the dimensions on it.

Wayne

EDIT: Errr, ^^^^^ the image Mike put at the top of the review has the dimensions on it in the top left corner too.

Edited October 11, 2012 by Wayne

[Mike]

But Wayne... that would require scrolling up!

[Wayne]

LOL! Yeah ... there is that ...

[robw_uk]

would this suit a "laager" type situation? overnight stop maybe with crew getting ready in the morning?

[Shar2]

I don't see why not. Here's my build using the country road kit.

The rest of the build and painting of the base is HERE