Dr Willett's Workshop: The Nook

Hi, Today I'm doing a review of the new resin building range of Dr Willett's Workshop more in particular of the The Nook fantasy building. Dr Willett's Workshop is a relatively new wargame company but has already some resin gems in his range such as The Nook, The Gold Rush Saloon and his Fenland Well. His shop also contains bits and pieces such as useful doors and bases, so if you have the time take a look and you will be amazed by the price and quality. The company also offers a commission service for miniatures and terrain, the picture below is of a painted The Nook building that is sold painted for £45. Enough general talk, up to the review!

The box

The resin building kit came in a nicely decorated cartonboard box and the content was extremely well packed and even with rough handling there won't be any damage possible. I was amazed by the quality of the packaging material and the effort it took to design and pack the resin model kit especially as this is a new company. Many other companies can learn from this!

The content

The Nook resin building kit contains 15 resin pieces ranging from the walls and roofs to some rather splendid detail pieces such as a barrel rack and a small bench. I have laid out all the pieces to give you an idea of the content and the quality of the casting. I was especially impressed by the design and craftmanship it took to master this scenery piece as everything was handsculpted by the owner. Talented chap me thinks!

The assembly

As I had never assembled resin builing set as I'm a scratchbuilder by heart, I asked the owner some tips and tricks of the trade in addition to the small leaflet that was included with the kit with some general infomation about handling resin. The owner was friendly enough to solve my questions and I started to construct the building. Well, it took several weeks to start this masterpiece. I started by constructing the building without glue to make sure that all parts fitted before I started to glue. As stated some larger pieces such as the walls were a bit warped, so I read the information leaflet and saw that it was possible to straighten these pieces by immersing them in hot tap water and straighten them up gently. After some attempts I managed to get the straight and I could start with cleaning and filling the pieces. I carefully tried to remove all excess resin pieces with fine sand paper and some of my sculpting tools and needles. A quite easy and not so time consuming job, that can improve the quality of the kit a lot. Please note when sanding resin wear a mask as the dust is toxic and not very healthy. After the cleaning I washed the pieces to remove the excess resin dust and make sure they were ready to be primed. After that I filled the airbubbles, well actually one big one as you can see in the fourth picture of this treat. The nature of the material and the casting method makes it possible for small airbubbles to emerge so you might need some small amounts of greenstuff at hand to fill them up. This also is a quite forward job and doesn't need much experience just make sure you use wet tools or fingers for the task otherwise it just a sticky mess.

After the filling I put the building together using regular super glue, constructing one part at a time to allow the glue to cure and make sure I wasn't making any mistakes during the constructing. In the following pictures you can see the front and backside of the building with an 28mm wargames Factory Orc as a size indicator.

Conclusion

In the end I was really amazed by the finished product and the ease of working with resin. I hope to buy some of these model kits in the future for new projects as I especially love the Gold Rush Saloon! This particular set retails for only £10.99 what's a steal for the quality and craftmanship you recieve. Interested in these kits don't hesitate to visit his webshop and add some nice centerpieces to your existing collection!

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