Short review and painting: Sarissa Precision Adobe Cantina

For the Secret Project, I bought a couple of the Sarissa Pecision Old West adobe line. I figured they were useful for a whole host of different games. The centrepiece was this two-story cantina. These are the bits out of the packet: basically, lots of precision-cut wood and a small instruction sheet.

I made two initial choices: to paint it unassembled (which is rare for me) and to leave the wooden boards the colour they were. So I started by dong a quick dry assembly to figure out how it went together before spraying everything that wasn't to be wood lightly with white spray primer. I split the walls into two batches to paint. Stage one was to pick out the brickwork in watered Vallejo 'Earth'. I used different consistency of paint and brushed it on lightly to give a varied texture. This avoided me doing any highlighting, but I may go back and dry brush some lighter shades on to reduce the contrast between the two colours. Stage two was to use watered down Vallejo 'Buff' on the lower portions of the walls and going up where walls would adjoin each other and other shaded areas (like around the beams). Here we are at stage two of the first batch:

Moving on, the walls got three highlights with 'Buff' mixed with white, up to a just off-white at the very tops. At all stages, I kept the paint quite thin to speed up the painting.  

Assembly now. I started off with superglue - don't bother! White glue works much better. The pieces all fit very snugly together. In fact, they can take a bit of jiggling and force to get them into the slots. I was a bit worried about breaking the thin pieces, but didn't so they much be quite sturdy. Getting them to fit in the right order is sometimes tricky, so test each piece before gluing.

Part assembled, I used elastic bands to hold the walls in while the glue dried. Probably not necessary, but a bit of a precaution.

And here we are assembled from the back and front. Quite an impressive building for its size. It also came with a ladder for roof access and I cut the doors out and mounted them on balsa-wood to make them openable. The kit was £18, a very reasonable price I thought!

I left off some of the window shutters of mine, but may add them later. You may notice that the second floor doesn't sit right from the back. For some reason the 'pins' holding the second floor on res on the beams rather than in the slots. So while everything else out of what was a pretty complex kit fit perfectly, these didn't. I emailed Sarissa these pics and they couldn't explain it either - apparently other kits in stock were fine and apparently I'm told I hadn't fudged the assembly either! Perhaps they were just being nice. Sarissa sent me another kit by way of apology - so full marks for customer service. In fact, service was impeccable, my order was dispatched very quickly and questions were answered promptly. With the price and custome service, I wouldn't hesitate to use Sarissa again, even among the booming laser-cut terrain market. Rather than leaving the unsightly gap, I fixed the issue with my kit by just clipping off the tags and filling in the slots with discarded tags. This worked fine and those particular noggins didn't seem important structurally - the rest of the structure, particularly the internal walls holds the second floor on.