Titan Quest Weapons Cart project

I have to admit it, I'm addicted to the videogame, Titan Quest. I found it at the Goodwill, where PC games are $1.99 (with no tax). I let it sit for several months on the shelf. But once I installed it on my PC, I was hooked.

It's a very long game. I loved the scenery, and thought about tying Titan Quest to Skeleton Warriors. The Skeletons are planning an invasion anyway, so they'd need to haul supplies, and the merchant weapons carts in the game gave me an inspiration.

Weapons merchant in Greece:

Weapons merchant in Egypt:

If you'll notice, the merchant in Greece inexplicably has an awful lot of fresh produce for sale, but no spears. The merchant in Egypt sensibly has spears, but has everything loaded on a less-stable 2 wheel cart.

These days, wooden wagon kits are hard to come by. It's not like the 70's, where one could get 1:16 scale kits by Allwood and Craft Master. I remember those kits.

On the low, low end of modern wagon kits is the Covered Wagon kit by Darice, which can be bought for only $1.99 (in 2015 dollars, not 1971 dollars). It's not a great kit, or even a good kit, but for the price of 2 candy bars, it at least provides a few useful parts and a framework to start. I knew I'd be making a lot of modifications, and wanted to do this old-school style, with as many functional components as possible. I had a book on Conestoga Wagons transferred from the San Carlos library so I could better understand the steering and undercarriage components.

Here's what you get in the bag. The wagon bed itself is about 6" long, but too narrow to be truly useful, so I cut my own wagon bed from plywood. The wheels could be used, but they needed hubs. The original axles were useless... fixed rectangular blocks of wood (with no steering) where you were expected to attach the wheels using a metal nail. Just... no.

Luckily, craft stores sell bags of wooden discs, so I bought a bag. It's much easier to use pre-punched discs than to cut and sand them by hand. And, I ended up using a lot of these wooden discs for this project.

TO BE CONTINUED...