No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century...

 "No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us..."

I've always loved the Jeff Wayne version of War of the Worlds, and the original book.  Less so the recent BBC tv adaptation, and let's not talk about the Tom Cruise film.  I saw the stage version of the Jeff Wayne musical back in 2014 at the O2 which quite a spectacle.

My 54mm Little Wars project continues with an attempt at building one of the Martian Tripods that come with the Paperboys book.  Many mistakes were made... many fingers spread glue on things that shouldn't have been glued... several pieces were glued on upside down... a lot of patience was lost...

The first thing you realise when building these is that 54mm is big!  I know that's kind of obvious but I hadn't really thought about just how big the tripods are.  To illustrate this the figure underneath the tripod is a 54mm figure so you can get a sense of the height.

The models are designed to represent the descriptions in the book and look really good... very evocative of the period...

The building process is relatively straightforward.  The body rests on a central support...

Each leg is built up from 3 sections: the end of each one slides into the next.  Getting the shape is a bit fiddly but the book suggests using a knitting needle (or in my case a skewer) as a shaper when rolling the paper.  Somehow I ended up with a tripod with one leg shorter than the others!

The main body is made up of 2 sections which are then glued together...

...and the roof is then shaped and stuck on...

The machine then has some tentacle-like grabbers 

Even though the upper body is quite light I was worried about whether the legs could support it so these were reinforced with bamboo skewers.  As I was building it I realised that the biggest problem with the tripod was going to be storage so I haven't permanently attached the legs.  For the photos they were blutacked on which meant it was all a bit precarious and shoogly!  The legs gave way several times as I was taking the photos,  Ideally they would need to be permanently glued on but where on earth would I keep the giant model!!?

I also realised that I'm very impatient when it comes to building things like this.  It obviously takes time for the glue to dry and I kept being tempted to try and move onto the next stage too quickly, spreading PVA and Prittstick glue around everywhere like a stroppy 5 year-old in nursery!

So that's another itch scratched.   I was pleased to have built it but I don't think I'll be building anymore as they are just too big and unwieldy, although the thought of several of these facing down a massed 54mm army is quite tempting but I think I'd definitely need a much, much bigger table and a lot more patience!!!  This has reminded me that after seeing the stage version of WotW back in 2014 I had a notion to do this in 6mm which is a much more practical idea.  My 6mm redcoated Zulu Wars British could just about pass muster (if you ignore the helmets) and it would all take up a lot less space... one to add to the "to-do someday list" I think.