Making siege towers

Recently we’ve been playing some siege games. Our club has one of the Citadel siege towers that used to be sold by Games Workshop along with the Citadel castle set, but for the general who’s serious about besieging a castle, and I mean REALLY SERIOUS, one siege tower just isn’t going to cut it. 

So I set about making a couple more.

My first thought was to 3d print some models. I got hold of a few STL files, but the dimensions of the finished product were a bit weird. The height to width ratio made it look really wide. 

The walls of the Citadel castle are 125mm tall to the top of the ramparts, so that sets the height of the drawbridge. I thought about scaling the 3d models, but if I made them narrower it would squash up the detail on the front, and it ended up looking weird. 

Additionally, the print time was really long – several days to print all the bits. So I gave up on 3d printing and decided to knock some together from balsa wood.

First up I draw a quick sketch to scale of the size of my tower, and cut four floors from some thick balsa wood. These would form the support structure for the tower and help hold it together. The rear side of the tower would have a slope, so that the tower is narrower at the top than at the bottom. Presumably this makes it more stable when troops are pushing it. 

 

Next I cut the sides of the tower from thinner wood. I had to make the sides in two section, because I wanted the grain of the balsa wood to be horizontal. 

 

Next I scored lines on with a pen and ruler to simulate timber planks.

 

 

I made enough pieces for two towers. Now it was time to start gluing!

 

The towers were glued together in two sections, top and bottom. I added some extra structure to the front edge for additional strength in the final model.

 

Everything was glued together with PVA glue and some crenellations were added to the top. 

 

Some more panels were added to the front. The back of the towers was left open. 

 

Next I started work on the drawbridges. These were balsa wood again, with some toothpicks fixed in the sides by drilling a hole with a Dremmel. These would comprise the hinge to allow the drawbridge to open. 

 

The wheels have been a conundrum for some time. It’s really annoying to cut wheels out of balsa wood, and they won’t end up properly round. Fortunately modern technology provided a solution. I 3d printed this set of wheels, and fixed them in place using axles made of thin wooden dowel. 

 

With the structure complete, it was time to start painting. I gave the towers a base coat of dark brown, followed by drybrushing two lighter shades of yellowish-brown and cream. For this type of project I just use test pots of house paint from a hardware store.

The wheels got a bit more attention with the metal painted GW Leadbelcher, followed by brown contrast paint and then black wash over the metal bits. 

 

The drawbridges were painted before attaching to the models because the hinge mechanism would have made it hard to paint. The hinges are just a short bit of balsa wood with a hole drilled through, glued to either side. 

 

I thought about adding a winch mechanism for the rope to lower the drawbridge, which is how the Citadel siege tower operates. But I quickly discarded that idea mainly out of laziness. The hassle of trying to fabricate a winch which would be used a maximum of once per battle (assuming the siege tower didn’t eat a cannonball on the way to the castle wall) didn’t appeal to me at all.

So I drilled a hole in the front panel of the tower and added a brass eyelet to make it look like a porthole, and ran the string through there. 

On the back of the tower I mounted some hooks and tied another eyelet to the string so it can be hooked in place, keeping the drawbridge raised during the battle until it reaches the wall. 

 

Finally I added some ladders, so that soldiers can reach the different floors. These were 3d printed and super glued in place. 

 

 

   

Now we’re ready to storm some walls!

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