Got a little brown on your stone...

My first mdf kits (evah) are from Burn In Designs (link at right).  I like this material!

For my residential neighborhood, I picked up a three-pack of 6 Story Brownstones, from the Federation City product line.

These types of apartment buildings can be found all around American cities.

The buildings come three to a pack and are all identical.  They consist of four walls and a roof, which all fit well together (wood glue is perfect for them).  Compared to my GameCraft houses, these apartment buildings are large.

As I've seen elsewhere, the tabs on the buildings stick out a bit after assembly and should be sanded down.  Don't get too vigorous with the sandpaper, though.  Some of my buildings are now a little wavy in spots.

Assembled and sanded.

After sanding, I filled in the cracks with Milliput and added a styrene rod to the roof to serve as a chimney.

The wooden material is very easy to paint and the dark paper that I inserted into the interior of the building glued on nicely.
I've finished one of these buildings, so far. 

It's not exciting to look at, but it isn't supposed to be.

I'm happy with these buildings and will be ordering others from Burn In Designs.  As a first exposure to mdf, these have been a positive experience.

Thanks for wrecking my house.  I didn't really want to live there, anyway.

Little Business to Report...

Part of my GameCraft purchase included a few resin buildings.
Resin has the reputation of being able to hold detail very well, but also being prone to air bubbles that can ruin the details you are trying to so-nicely show off.

I ordered this set of small businesses and this larger building with a restaurant on the ground floor.
The three of them came in a white-ish resin that required almost no cleanup of flash.

The backs of the buildings were rough with some deeper pitting.  I filled in the larger holes with Milliput and will paint the backs darker colors. 

This roughness/pitting in the back of the models doesn't concern me much.  Having spent much of my life living in large cities, the rear-ends of commercial buildings are frequently pretty ugly.

Lots of unsavory back-alley deals go on here.

This is pretty minor stuff, nothing to be concerned about in terms of determining the quality of the product.

The other sides of the larger building were perfect.  It's really a nice looking model, with window panes and decorative brickwork. When I get to painting it I will have fun.

I can already hear music in my head as tiny patrons sip foreign coffee and laugh during a wonderful summer eve's dining.

The other two buildings had some problems.

This second building had very nice details, with minor warping on the front bottom corners of the facade.  This is not really an issue to my mind, as both corners turned inwards identically and this gives the appearance of being intentionally designed by its architect.

The second one has the same detailing as the first, but in this one bubbles created damaged arches.  I filled these in with greenstuff.  I'm not a sculptor, but when painted it should look okay.

Overall, I'm happy with these buildings, they fit in with my general expectation of quality from GameCraft, even with some of the problems that resin is noted for.

So far I've painted up one of them.  It took about as long as it does for me to paint up a typical 28mm miniature.

Lovely arches.  Those window frames and door knobs are sculpted in.

I will definitely be buying more resin products from GameCraft.