Wizards Tower, Part One "Lets make foam bricks, a lot of foam bricks"

 A few months ago, I made a custom 3 level Wizards Tower for my friend Steve Mac to use on his D&D Streaming Channel "Castlemac".  He wanted to surprise his players so I've held off until now posting about the build.  It's a pretty simple design and was a lot of fun to build.

This post will cover the construction.

 I cheated a bit and purchased some styrofoam 12" diameter circles, that were 1" think.  I've always struggled cutting precise circles in EPS and wanted the base of each level to be as uniform as possible.  Steve's uses a 1" grid so one was added using a dull pencil.

 Once the grid was drawn in, I marked off 4 points in 90 degree increments which was very helpful later on in the project.  Then the somewhat tedious part of the project started - brick work.  The first course of bricks are 2"x1"x1" rectangles.  I went with larger "base bricks as the matches the floor level and broke up the monotony of the exterior a bit.  These were attached with hot glue and some care needed to be taken to ensure they where level with the floor.  I did angle the edges of each brick about 7-10 degrees to allow them to fire snugly along the diameter.  These cuts were just eyeballed and worked out ok.

Next came the laying of the smaller bricks - these where .5"x.5"x1" in size and laid in a double wall as you can see in the third picture.  I used Eileen's tacky glue to affix these as its thick enough to hold them in place put gives you an hour so to reposition, cut or level any bricks before the glue sets.

Each level is 3 inches high so the means 6 layers of double bricks per level.  To try and keep the walls plum once the third level of bricks was placed I added wood beam supports.  These were cut on my table saw using oak 1/2 inch square stock.  Any wood would do, but oak is what I had on hand. It's very important that these are all precisely the same size or you will end up with a leaning tower.  I used the 90 degree marks mentioned above to place the beams and glued them in place.  Once set and plum, walk away and let the glue cure.

Since this is a Tower with multiple levels,. we do need some stairs.  I was a bit daunted on how to make curved stairs until I realized I could take an extra foam disk and cut out a 1" deep piece .  These sections were then sliced in 1"2 inch heights and easy-peasy stairs that miniatures can stand on were born.

The entry to the Tower was even simpler than the stairs - I just cut three extra 1/2 inch wood beams and glued them in place.  Some custom brick cutting is needed to fit the bricks around the door frame but that's pretty easy.

You can still see that by the 6 level the brick aren't completely level.  I took my foam cutting knife and cut off anything that was over 3" - I used another 3" wood beam as a guide to do so.

This picture also shows that the bricks are all  textured.  The texture was added by putting the "freshly" cut bricks in a sealed container (I used an empty paint can), tossing some rocks in and shaking the thing violently.  It works surprisingly well and is good therapy when one is going crazy after cutting too many bricks.  Word to the wise, shaking bricks in a metal can with rocks is very loud and one shouldn't do this at 5:30am on a Saturday morning when one's wife got in at 2:00am the night before after performing a long and complicated surgery.  It doesn't end well for the hobbiest.

With level 1 done, it was time to rinse and repeat for levels 2 and three.  There are three differences for level two:
1) No door frame
2) I added 4 arrow slits
3) needed to cut out a space over the stairs up from level one.  This section also became the base of the stairs that are added to level two!

The same location process was used for the four wood beams.

Cutting in the arrow slots was harder than it looks but eventually they got done.

Level two is done and now I can create another one just like it.  Yipeee!!!!!

The top section took some time to figure out.  I changed up the base course of bricks going with 1x1x1" wedges and made a very simple crenellation along the top.   To be honest by this time I was getting a little tired of foam bricks.

Subsequent to this picture I changed the design of the top pretty radically.  You'll just have to wait and see what it became.  OK maybe not, you can look closely at the first picture if you really want to.

and we're the finished tower.  The next post will deal with painting and scenicing the base.

I suspect one or two of you maybe wondering how many bricks went into this little project.  My rough estimate is just under 1,600 0.5x.0.5x 1.0 bricks

 One note - this project would be impossible with out the right tools and the most important is my trusty Proxxon hot wire cutting table.  I think it's the most useful hobby tool I have and well worth the $120ish price tag.

One word of advice - the table comes with it's own mitre gauge, which is pretty much useless as it doesn't hold fast.

I strongly suggest you build a more robust straight edge - it's really simple and you can see how I built the one to the left here.  I think it took me 15 minutes to do.

My guide is not very pretty but it works perfectly.