Summary of Wooden Medieval Projects (plans and files)
There is something really attractive – especially to woodworkers – about the Medieval Era. It’s a time when engineering relied completely on trial and error, the materials at hand were very basic (leather, wood, iron etc.) and it was all about scaling upwards. Huge stone Medieval Castles, huge wooden siege weapons and war seemed as ordinary then as reading the daily paper online is today. It was a crazy time!
I wasn’t nor am I currently immune to this idealization of the Medieval Period, one of the first models I really built with any type of complexity was my wooden Medieval Castle Walls. It was big (by my previous standards), complex (up to that point) and was an incredible amount of fun to build.
Although I’ve since made the assembly instructions available free at WoodMarvels.com, the basic designed remained the same even after I decided to apply new knowledge from trial and error to make a version B of it. Medieval Castle Walls B.
The difference between these two woodworking, laser and/or CNC projects are vast but what really made the difference was what I had learned about design, technology and building from the first to the second. I then decided to get into smaller siege weapons… again, the designs of the Medieval Era were very functional and straight forward – making them easy to build (at least for me). First was the Mangonel Siege Weapon…
and it was too “small and simple” to I hit the drawing board to make a more complex, bigger and appealing version. The Mangonel B Siege Weapon.
I had lots of fun building it so my next step was to make a Baliste Siege Weapon using the same platform I had developed for the Mangonel Siege Weapon B but with a few further refinements.
During the course of these projects, I decided to build a few Medieval buildings but instead of just being buildings, I decided to create “bank” versions so they were at least functional. The first was the Medieval Castle Bank…
followed by the Medieval Tower Bank.
I believe during this time I was also writing a science fiction book, 2847 A.D.: Solar Horizons
A simpler design than my Medieval Castles B but never the less – equally as challenging as I tried different construction techniques on it. After all this Medieval building over the past years, I had an opportunity to build a model for Trotec Laser’s booth at the 2011 International Toy Fair in Nurnberg, Germany – we talked about a few things that might be interesting but at the end of the day, a huge (one of my biggest models to date) Medieval Castle was agreed to.
It was a really fun project and they did a video of it being cut on their larger machines too!
I did go through several ideas during the building process though – only some of which made it to the final project.
Where things stand now
Well, I haven’t gotten the itch to make another Medieval project – these kind of projects are like the cold, when you have it, you got to deal with it (design something… anything Medieval) and when you don’t get inspired nothing much happens on the Medieval front to the point that you don’t even think about it. If you noticed, all the above projects are LASER but I have recently acquired an itch to either convert some of these to CNC or design something fresh to be released in both native CNC and laser formats.
I do have a dream of building a whole wooden Medieval Village complete with wooden moat, soldiers on horses etc… I think it would be great fun to build but right now, I’m just looking at all my options – leaving this more extensive project probably a little further into the future simply because I want to learn more about CNC and laser before tackling such a large project.