Airfix Gun Emplacement

This is a post about the famous Airfix Gun Emplacement, or at least what's left of the one I had many years ago.

Actually, there isn't much left at all, just the two bunkers, with the base and match-firing gun long gone.  Furthermore, the octagonal bunker was at some point converted into a pillbox by cutting some rough holes in the sides, but this was never very satisfactory.  Consquently I thought it was time for an upgrade.  And here it is.

For this small project I decided to have the pillbox sitting in a base, which is made of a couple of layers of polystyrene foam.  Once shaped, the base was covered in rough sand, painted in earth tones and textured with flock, adding cloves from the kitchen spice-rack cut down to look like tree stumps.

In addition, I constructed some 'concrete' walls around the entrance, textured to look as though wooden shuttering had been used to form them; a technique I believe the brutalist French architect Corbusier was very fond of, as were the German occupiers.  In my case, this effect was done by gluing wooden coffee stirrers to a thin foam core and then painting them to look like concrete to match the repainted pillbox.

The pillbox actually lifts off so figures can be put inside.  Furthermore, considering the gun emplacment set is not being made any more (at least at the time of writing), I may yet construct my own scratch-built version of the entire model, built around this remaining element.