Swedish model maker Jan Karman completes his trilogy of nostalgic tributes to Airfix models from his childhood with The Coastal Defence Fort.
I still remember sitting in my parents’ garden looking through the Airfix catalogue and wishing that I had that kit to go with my gun emplacement. The illustration looked great, with the two large guns pointing out to sea from the top of a steep cliff and the twin antiaircraft guns blazing away from the roof of the bunkers. It was another creation of the Airfix toy department rather than the model department and lacked the details of their “proper” model kits, but it was easy to put together and great for using with your figures and vehicles.
I have recently retired so although I now have plenty of time to indulge in model-making, I no longer have access to the machinery and space I had become used to when I was working. This meant I needed to use materials that are easy to cut and shape. I also wanted to try to use materials I already had at home rather than order things online as soon as I needed anything, a habit that makes model-making more expensive than it needs to be.
QUESTIONS OF REALITY
I started to build a more or less accurate model of the original toy by scaling up the original model and cutting out the different parts from thick card. It was an easy enough build that would not take very long. However, the more I researched the real life inspiration for the model, the more I felt that I wanted to represent the reality a bit more than the Airfix kit did
I looked in particular at German bunkers that would house large guns like the ones in the kit. The M270 casemate was a good example, housing a 150mm gun and with two metres thick walls. That would make the walls on my model just over 3.5cm thick, which is very different to the thin polystyrene walls of the Airfix version.
To make the model relatively compact and still use realistic thicknesses for the walls, I designed the surrounding bunker structures with a wall thickness of one metre. This was what the Germans called “Verstarkt feltmessig”, reinforced fieldtype constructions, designed to withstand direct hits by artillery shells up to 105mm and aerial bombs up to 50kg.
To keep the footprint of the bunker as small as possible, I did leave out ammunition storage, etc. Let’s agree that they are located underground.