Ok guys... I need some guidance here...

I customer asked me to make him a Warsaw Ghetto scene of Jews hiding in a sewer while Germans searchd for them on the street above. I spent about 75 hours carving this from a large section of Balsa Foam, and am at a turning point. i asked the client if I could create a mold of this and add it to my product line, and he said fine. Now - before I spend about $300 on RTV and dental plaster to create this mold, I need to know if I will at least break even.... are there 6 people here who would pre-order this unit at a reduced price of $45 each?

This will be a VERY difficult and large mold to make, and will take almost two gallons of RTV Silicon to create, due to the way I built the kit. I was originally trying to reduce the number of seams and joins to make a better finished piece before I thought of adding it to ScaleMilitary.com.

If I know I can get enough sales to at least cover my costs at a special price, then I will make the mold, and will sell the kit to others for $69.95. Any takers - or should I just finish the kit and collect my money from the client? If interested, let me know! ([email protected])

Questions and comments welcome... and there are several more photos on my Gallery Page link:
https://armorama.kitmaker.net/photos/showgallery.php?cat=12141&ppuser=84

That is awesome!!! Great work!!!

Think "War of the Rats", the original title of Enemy at the Gates. This has potential, for sure

I am not sure what you used for references to carve this section but if these are normal height figures (not midgets) then the sewer is way too tall. I have had the advantage of growing up watching many WW2 movies (some documentaries) related to the underground movement of forces in occupied Poland. One of the best movies is titled "Kanal". A lose translation would be "Sewer" or "Canal". It is an old black and white flick dealing with people moving around the city using sewers. If you can get your hands on it, rent it. I think you might want to scale the height of your sewer by about half. The way it looks right now you could park a tank in there and that is not the way things were back then.

Marty - I had two references... one was a drawing from the customer with a note on the back, and the other was from an photo of a post war East Berlin sewer. The customer (I'm actually building this for a Jewish synagoge here in Dallas) had translated the note on the back. It described the "grand vault" where these people were hiding when caught. It was an intersection area of several smaller sewer lines that was running under the ghetto. It said the

"Our tunnel is wet and musty, and smelled of rot. There are dead animals bones here and there and the walls and floor are covered with slime and mold, making it somewhat difficult to move about. This is not a pleasent place for children, but we have no alternative. The structure is about 5 meters in height and 6 meters wide, with a ditch running through the floor. Smaller chutes came in from several other directions, bringing both sewer water and other escapes on a regular basis. We hide as far away from the street opening as we can, because the Germans will certainly look in from time to time. Keeping the children quiet is the greatest concern, because voices echo like a pipe organ for a kilometer in every direction."

Knowing that a meter is about 39 inches, this gave me a scale height of 15 feet by 18 feet wide... and this was the dimension scale I have built for the unit. I am going to have to scratch build a few more items, and then do custom work to make the civilian children.

I suppose that would be OK for a main sewer intersection. Keep in mind that what you see in East Berlin will most likely not be the same as what you would see in Warsaw. Also many of the sewer openings of larger sections were welded shut by the Germans to prevent people from using them as escape routes.

On the subject of sewers....... has anybody seen the T34 that crashed through the sewers in Per Olav Lund´s dio "Der Abwasserkanal"
check it out here .
That might inspire some to try a sewer or even a dio on more than one level! He has also modelled his sewer to approximately the same size!

Excellent piece of work Keith! A complete dio base already made ... just paint and figures! Thats a couple of really nice pieces you have released lately!

kfmagee: looks ver nice, geat job, I like it
I think 45 $ is a right price

Plasticbattle: very nice dio, very particular!nice idea

regards

Marty - the information I "took" from the East Berlin photo was the plastered walls. The photo was from the early 1950's, and the section wasn't even round... more oval in shape with squared arches every 20-30 feet or so.

The Warsaw letter didn't describe "what" kind of walls the slime was covering, so I went looking. I found a photo in a book about "great escapes of the cold war" that showed what *appears* to be a plaster or concrete covering over brick and stone - so that's what I went with... I guess it makes sense in that a soft porous brick would absorb too much moisture and might give way over the course of time... so either they coated the brick with concrete or some form of plaster. The photo is in black and white, so I really can't tell... I had to use a bit of "artistic" liscense! To insinuate the "junction" in this vault, you will see at the far right end I have squared off the curved wall, and rounded the "rat walk" to perhaps show another courseway coming from an intersecting vault... again, just guessing here.

A lot of times people bring me an idea or a "partial" image (drawing, photo, napkin!) which leaves me a lot of room for creative guessing. I admit that a 15 to 18 foot tunnel would be pretty large... I don't know how it was built, but in my native New Orleans, we had open ditch canals that were HUGE... in the 70's, the rolled concrete tubing into the canals, then covered them up on top... that seems a plausible concept here too... Warsaw is a very old city and I doubt that they had sophisticated tunneling machinery when the city was laid out. But large ditches that are later covered would have been something they could have done to create such a large open area... who knows - as long as people like it, right?

Keith, I definitley agree that in building models (especialy designing something from scratch) we sometimes need to get creative. Since the subjects we deal with are from a distant past it is sometimes hard to get things exactly as they were. I think that people will like your sewer section (I know I do) and it should make for an eye catching dio piece.

I'll send pics when I get back in town... the painted work makes it look really nice... and I think I "Will" do a small cramped sewer line... would you recommend a two-pice unit that can be split apart... or the same format, but smaller in diameter... any pics helpful!

When I made my shadow box of the sewers under Stalingrad I used a section of 4 inch PVC as the "tube." I glued Evergreen brick to it, after I cut the bottom third off, added walkways like Magee did and called it done. It was pretty cool, I thought. There is something to be said for artist license, from where I am sitting. Expecting someone to come up with photos of a sewer in Warsaw in 1945 is a bit much to ask. Now, if I was going to make a diorama of a Tiger I plunging through a hole into an tomb in the desert, that would be different.

I love it, Magee.

Shaun