Raid on Sualco calls for two buildings, one at each end of the bridge, which the attackers are to blow up. Their function isn't specified-they could be machinery houses of some sort or, as I chose to represent them, armored guard posts. A simple pile of sandbags wouldn't be worth blowing up, so I decided to make them corrugated iron huts with sandbags piled below the shutters.

The materials required were simple. The most obvious requirement was something to represent the corrugated iron the sheds are built from. For that, the corrugated cardboard packing that comes with light bulbs is perfect. It's corrugated and it has a flat paper backing. It's not very sturdy, however, so some thin card (in this case, a brownie mix box) needed to be glued on as backing. The same box would also be used for the bases. Some white (great northern) beans for sandbags, balsa wood for doors, and flocking material were the only other things needed.

The first step was to decide how big the huts should be. I wanted to be able to place four figures inside. My figures are mounted on 19mm bases, so something just over 40mm square would be perfect. In order to keep the huts as small as possible, I decided that I wouldn't worry about what direction figures are facing while inside-after all, they won't be visible anyway with the roofs in place. That way, I didn't have to account for rifle barrels or pointing fingers on the buildings' footprints.

Two pieces of corrugated paper were cut to approximately the right size and a piece of brownie box was cut roughly to match. Rubber cement was used to attach the corrugated paper to the cardstock-white glue would have caused curling.

With the corrugated paper and card assembled, a pattern for all four walls was then drawn onto the backing.

The photo shows the pattern ready to have the door and windows cut out, but in fact I reproduced the pattern on the opposite (corrugated) side and then cut from that side, for two reasons. First, the cuts through the corrugated paper turn out much cleaner when done from the front. Second, that allowed me to make small right or left adjustments to the vertical cuts so they would line up with troughs in the corrugation. Keeping the cuts in the troughs both looks better and prevents having loose, flapping corners along a cut where the corrugated paper isn't attached to anything. The roof line was trimmed with scissors.

Then the vertical fold lines were scored for bending. Normally I score cardstock with a ballpoint pen, but here, something more drastic was required. I used a sharp X-acto blade to actually carve a small but significant V-shaped notch out of the cardboard backing so that the corners would fold crisply. Then I made a tab from a corner of the brownie box (already folds nicely!), glued it along one edge, folded the walls into a square, and glued the opposite wall to the tab.

The roofs were made the same way, by rubber cementing corrugated paper to brownie box backing. I added a square of heavier corrugated cardboard to the underside of the roofs so they wouldn't slide off the buildings when in place.

Finally, the walls were glued to bases.

In the photo, notice that the far building has a pin stuck through its base. This was to keep the building square while the glue holding to the base dried. The corners were a bit tight and the walls wanted to deform into a diamond shape, so pins kept it square until the white glue dried.

With the buildings assembled and stuck on bases, the next step was to spray paint everything flat black. While the paint dried, I made the doors from balsa wood. The wood was cut larger than the door opening and vertical lines were pressed into it with a dry ballpoint pen. Then I held it up inside the hut and marked where the edges of the doorframe would be. Those markings were used as guides to cut crosspieces, which were then glued in place. The whole thing was stained with Minwax wood stain and drybrushed with light gray.

Once the undercoat was dry on the buildings, they were painted. First was a coat of metallic charcoal gray, covering nearly everything but the very bottoms of the corrugated troughs. Next was lighter metallic gray, drybrushed heavily across the grain of the corrugation. Then terra-cotta was drybrushed along the corrugations in spots and streaks to look like rust. Finally, a light drybrush of silver was run along the high points and edges.

With the painting done, white beans were rubber cemented (again, to prevent curling) around the walls, leaving an opening by the doors and stopping below the level of the shutters (in this case, that was four layers of beans). When the doors were glued inside the buildings, the construction was done.

All that remained was to trim the bases and then flock around the sandbags. I used green flock everywhere except in front of the doors, where I used brown to show how the grass had been trampled by guards moving in and out.

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