My First 1/35 scale Vietnam war period bunker,
From epoxy sculpt,and primed with Mr Hobby paint.

Wow! Amazing work!

Will it be available commercially?

Mario

Damn Maarten, This is REALLY nice work ! You get yourself some Bravo6 figures, a little paint and lots of pigments and you have yourself a world class diorama!
As Mario asked, "will this be available commercially?" If you ever do release this IMHO sales will be big!

3 out of 3 beer rating for originality, effort & execution!
Thanks for sharing Maarten !

Maki & Ivanhoe
Thanks guys for the nice comments,

commercially ? i don't know.

PS
Also working on a Vietnam war Mortar pit,
for the Tamiya 107mm Mortar (Small but a golden oldie )
When its primed i will post pictures

Super impressive! If that was a resin cast offering I would buy one in a heartbeat.

Amazing work. Looks like the beginning of a Khe Sanh diorama. You are one of the true artists here on Armorama.

Incredible!

The sandbags I make look like chewed bubblegum compared to your work.

To echo the other, please tell me that is going to be produced for sale.

Fantastic work , congratulations, i think
...how many time did you spent to realize this masterpiece????


Mario from Italy.

boy you did a nice job! Only complaints I see, and so minimal hey are not worth mentioning. Being as I spent ten months as my First Sargent's private whipping boy; trust me I've stacked thousands and thousands of sand bags in my sentence of indentured enslavement.

The outer walls really want to be at an angle to keep things stable. Lots of folks didn't do this and got to rebuild the walls over and over. The angle only needs to be around ten degrees. You need a blast shield in front of the door way. About four and a half feet high and maybe eight feet long. Keeps bad stuff from entering your domain. The watch tower as nice but you really only want about two to two and a half feet opening (even a foot and a half is fine). Then stretch chicken wire over the opening to keep the grenades and satchel charges out. Also with a pure sand bag roof, the kids are looking at getting their heads wet everytime it rains. We used tarps from trucks with sand bags ontop to keep them in place.
gary

P.S. it was sort of a building code that every bunker and hard point has at least two entries or exits. Its a safety issue, and was there long before I showed up. We had a fantastic concrete under ground bunker system that had enough soil ontop to stop a 155 round if it happened. But it only had one way in and one way out. No one would sleep in it, and this time of the year it was the only dry place around.
glt

Chapman,Bodeen,Sherb,Mario and trickymissfit,
Thanks for looking and comments and tips appreciate it.

Looks great. Can you share more on how you made the sand bags, any tips or lessons learned? How deep are your sandbag layers, like on the watch tower roof, is that all sandbags or is the center hollow/some other structure?

TIA

Awesome Bunker!!!

Ryan K and Joe,
Thanks !

The Roofs :
I placed the first layer all around and filled the middle with resin to the level of the bags and repeat the same with the second,and the top part is fully covered.

The bunker :
Made a Box from 1mm evergreen plastic card .
The bags :
I made chicklet shapes from two part Apoxie sculpt and started stacking ,
and all the shaping of the bags was done with silicone sculpting tools
After all the shaping ........i lightly pressed them with some packing foam to give them some texture.

Like a said ......this is my first time making something like this
Plenty of pics on the WWW to study.

Thanks for the information Maarten.

I can only echo the rest of the crew and offer my envy, err, congratulations on a job well done!

What they've said, it looks superb Maarten...but what's it doing here? This ship's slowly settling in the water & going down, hope you'll take this and your other "concrete" dios over to the new site soon

Fantastic work. Congrats Maarten.

Great info Gary, thank you!

Mario

Frigin A Piet , that looks soooooooo cool !!
Nicely done man !!

Deathdork,Tank1812,Diomartin,Graywolf and Cheyenne

Thanks Brother , glad you like it ....no plaster used in these .

The mortar pit,Finished and primed .

kept the ground in the pit bare ,
Because i am Not sure what ground texture to use when de dio is build .

I am on the other site from now on

Hi Maarten,

Truly outstanding, love the detail, I have always wanted to do a Vietnam era Firebase type bunker, but sculpting all those sandbags has always put me off, but you've nailed it, .

Cheers, ,

G

Actually Top and I are closer than I was with my own Father! Just that my walls stayed together. I never ever filled a single sand bag, and it was whomever he had in his own little dog house that married the shovel. I was enslaved due to an incident with a Sargent Major and a rice paddy. He was long gone, but Top kept finding ways to keep me busy till midnight or even two in the morning.

Back to the bags. Most folks get the colors every so majorly wrong by the time frame. Green bags are not canvas but somekind of woven plastic material (think trash bags). They started to appear in very late Spring or early Summer 68. Prior to that you had canvas bags in grey and a purple violet color. It was very common to see these two mixed together. It was mostly what the flew out to you, and you don't get to select your favorite colors. Sand is not all that good for sand bags as when the bag is ripped open the sand runs out (almost always down by the bottom row). Good old red clay was best. So after a month in the monsoon, you often saw pretty red orange streaks going to meet the Satan.

The NVA had a combat position called a "sapper". We didn't that I know of. They often used a sand bag with with a block of C4 or even TNT out of a dud 155 round with a fuse lit. Then there of course was the hand grenade, but not as often as you'd think. They also made a home made grenade out of a beer can with black powder and a fuse. Simply roll in a couple at the sametime, and your history. All that chicken wire puts a damper in his plans.

Never liked bunkers much as I always had an uneasy feeling around midnight. Still they had there pluses (dry and pretty much bullet proof), but if my stomach groaned I went outside in the rain.

That roof top observation point needs two or three things. A field telephone, a Starlight scope on a tripod, and an M14 rifle (no scope). Maybe add one of those Igloo coolers to make it kinda deluxe, and of course the M60 with a few cans of ammo.
gary