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Hey, I decided to try making a round tower because I want to build an MOC with one in it. I can't figure out how to attach it to a baseplate or put a floor on the top of it. Please help.

I have gotten this part down though I have not been able to get much above a few courses as after windows and such I just cannot get it to work.

To attach it you need to place a few flat pieces along the bottom of the wall. These are placed along to correspond to the baseplate. I usually skip a few bricks along the bottom but you can use the round 1x1 or flat 1x1 as well is spaces properly. If this does not help I can take some pictures.

R

I would personally love to see pictures of this technique. Round tower construction has always fascinated me.

I figured this part out a couple days ago. Basically, the wall is going to rest on tiles except for a couple key anchor points. Those points should be connected to 1x1 or 1x2 plates to keep it the same height as the tiles. Just experiment a little and you'll figure it out. The roof is basically the same, though if you get it round in just the right dimensions you might be able to use curved plates for that part. And don't be afraid if the roof is rotated a little off the baseplate's axis. Sometimes it looks better that way.

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=102768
This may help.

You could also use some small turntables to attach it, we used this in our layout, and it works very well.

"You could also use some small turntables to attach it, we used this in our layout, and it works very well."

That is a very good idea, I don't think I would ever come up with that. Been pondering a MOC with round towers, so this topic is great.

Thanks for the tip!

~Amanda

If only this thread was here a few days ago!

I'm in the process of making a curved wall, having no experience of it at all. Randall and Voran have summed it up perfectly though, I used that very technique to keep it on the baseplate. Because you're working against the studs you can only connect at a handful of points rather than all of them, but that's a natural problem if you're going to be building something of this nature imo.

I invented a 1x1 plate technique last year for the allure of my shell keep:



This works quite well but needs a huge amount of 1x1's and a lot of patience to put them together

Ben

Hey,

On attaching it, you basically have to make do with a relatively small number of studs on the ground actually attaching to the tower above, and then fill in the gaps with tiles.

As to the floors, there are a couple of ways you can go. You can simply build the floors up from the ground level, not actually attached to the walls at all, or you can have bricks pointing in from the walls and then set the floor in as a shelf on top of these. In any case there are going to be small gaps between your floor and the curved wall, but you can try to minimize these. For instance look at this and this from Jacob. I've seen others try and minimize the gaps a little more by using combinations of the different wedge plates along the edges of the floor to better fit against the curved wall.

Bruce

architect wrote:I invented a 1x1 plate technique last year for the allure of my shell keep:



This works quite well but needs a huge amount of 1x1's and a lot of patience to put them together

Ben

HOLY SMOKES!!! That is BEAUTIFUL! Is it just constructed out of 1X2 bricks? I assume two concentric circles? What is the diameter? I assume that's about the smallest diameter you could create by bending walls of this type.

I'd love to see a progress shot or two of this to learn from!

Simply amazing.

kibosh wrote: HOLY SMOKES!!! That is BEAUTIFUL! Is it just constructed out of 1X2 bricks? I assume two concentric circles? What is the diameter? I assume that's about the smallest diameter you could create by bending walls of this type.

Well I don't know what the diameter is on that, but my experiments with 1x2 curved wall construction result in the tightest curve that still attaches to baseplates to be 96x96 studs to make a full circle. Basically 1 large gray baseplate for each quarter section in order to secure the "ends" without having the wall under too much stress.

I built a floor to sit inside my sem-circular tower by building it as one big SNOT section, just once brick wide. If you use slopes and inverse slopes you can get a floor that goes pretty close to the walls.

FWIW, the tightest curve I've seen made out of 1x2 bricks had a radius of 12 -14 studs or so. OUCH. It was done by one of the master builders for the Millyard Project, and at the time, he confessed that he had never gotten bricks to fit in a curve so tightly. Also, while assembling it, he had the bricks "explode" a few times as the curved wall gave way to its baser instincts. So in the end, it needed to be glued in order to hold its shape. And of course I'll bet that kind of constant stress would warp the bricks, too!

DaveE

For a curved wall with a small curve, I suggest 1x2 bricks staggered with 1x1 round bricks. You can get some pretty tight curves out of that. You just need a lot of the required pieces.