SANGARS

Like one of my favorite fellow bloggers — Willie Anderson, over at “The Anderson Collection” — not long ago I was surprised to learn I’d reached the built-in limit for image-storage on this blog-site — at least “free” image-storage.  After sucking it up and signing on to pay a just-above-nominal-monthly-fee to free up a few more mega-bytes of image space, I am returning to blog about building some SANGARS — defensive positions made from loose rock.

Here’s a picture from an April 1878 issue of The Illustrated London News, showing a Gurkha attack on  a line of hilltop sangars during the early phase of the Second Afghan War:

And finally — to show they still haven’t gone out of style — here’s a contemporary photo of a sangar in western sahara:

For a while I’ve wanted to build some sangars for use in my NWF and Second Afghan War games.  This was driven by my knowledge of the importance such defensive works had served in many battles on the Frontier and in Afghanistan, and also by a blog-post made some time ago by JAMES over at his fantastic wargaming blog,  “RABBITS IN MY BASEMENT” (click on blog title to visit the site).

With James’ kind permission, I am reproducing said post in its entirety — which includes well-deserved recognition of the legendary John the OFM of The Miniatures Page fame for having come up with the original idea — here: 

In fact I built my first several sangars using FISH-TANK GRAVEL, a combination of white glue and super-glue, but only because I had forgotten to buy the above-mentioned GORILLA GLUE.  And though these first rocky works turned out quite nice, they required a great deal more time and effort than their Gorilla Glued cousins.  I also spackled on a bit of Elmer’s Wood Filler, here and there, over the otherwise completed rocky works, to represent spots covered in dirt, fine gravel, &/or dried mud.

For the paint-scheme of the rocks, I DRY-BRUSHED on succeedingly lighter coats of:

1.  BLACK – solid base-coat
2.  CHOCOLATE BROWN – very heavy dry-brush
3.  HONEYCOMB  (Delta Ceramcoat CARAMEL color) – medium dry-brush
4.  SANDSTONE  (Delta Ceramcoat PALE TAN color) – light dry-brush
5.  BUTTERCREAM  (Delta Ceramcoat OFF-WHITE color) — barest hint of a dry-brush

For the semi-circles of ground-cover, I skipped the black and started off with chocolate brown, so they’d blend in better with the ground-cover of my terrain-boards — except for one pair of sangars which I planned to use atop my rocky hills, those I base-coated in solid black, so they’d blend into the surface of my similarly-painted hills.

The first thing to do is CUT your old CD/CD-ROM/DVD in half.  Use any straight-edge, and a utility knife, X-acto blade, or similar.

Next is filling in the small gap at the center of the straight edge, so you have a complete semi-circle base to work with.  This can be done using almost any flat material, an off-cut of plasticard, a piece of a small piece of a laminated container, etc…

Next I added a thin layer of Wood Filler, which I knew, once it was dry, would do a better job as the surface to glue sand and pebbles onto than the smooth plastic of the CD itself…

Next I added a bead of white glue around the curved edge of the semi-circle…

And started placing fish-tank gravel piece by piece…

Then a second layer to add depth…

Side-by-side you get a good idea of the difference: