More boards

Hi all

Another update on progress. I’ve been gluing two boards together a day so after a few days I’ve finished 8 boards. You can see the river section I cut in the boards and some of the plain boards. They all begin and exit at the same point on each board so I can vary the setup

The first 8 boards

WIP – gluing the boards onto the foam. I use a Selleys “No More Nails” which seems pretty strong and easy to use, and I let it cure for the full 24hours for each board. I stack the rest of the boards ontop and a few boxes of wargaming figures to weigh it down while the glue sets. SO far I’ve only had one board slide a bit while the glue was setting, so I will have to trim the edges with a hand saw.

Closeup with the glue I’m using

The Joins. I had to leave a reasonable gap between each board otherwise the foam “teeth” catch on the wood of the other board when you push them together. I found this out the hard way after I cut all the pieces and glued the first couple to the foam and the foam wouldn’t interlock. So I had to go back and cut 20mm off 2 sides  of each of the wooden boards… The only good thing is I can use the offcuts for the table edge pieces.

BTW all my flock from Angel Barracks has turned up and it looks very good. I’m going to start a test with the paint and flock on one of the boards. Hopefully the paint will cover the green and black evenly.

Town Planning

Another update as I figure out how I will layout my towns. I’m trying to get away from the traditional square shaped towns but still have something that is flexible. Hexagons seems to fit together well and it is easier to run roads at different angles. I can also use blank sections to make the towns smaller or use the individual pieces as smaller towns.

I created some 1:1 cardboard templates I am using to map out my towns. The rules I use for moderns have a restriction of 300x300mm for any town so the furthest distance of any two points of the hex is 300mm. I will make enough for 4 towns with 2 of each layout and some extra bits in the future.

I  am also planning to use the same shapes for my forests so I could mix town and forest sections together.

The little rectangles represent buildings and the larger one a church (kind of)

Layout number 1

Layout number 2

Some variations

And more variations

Lots more options are possible but this gives you an idea. I can make bigger or smaller towns depending how I match the pieces so it will hopefully be flexible.

I will use 2mm plasticard for the town bases as it is nice and strong and doesn’t warp. I’ll probably bevel some of the edges as 2mm is quite thick.

After cutting out some of the smaller pieces I realise that I will have to be careful with some of the larger buildings, which I don’t know if they will fit that well on the bases

Back with a new project – 6mm terrain boards!

Making 6mm Terrain boards

Over the last year or so i’ve been amassing ideas, bits and pieces to begin work on a set of 6mm terrain boards. These will be used for mostly 20th century gaming but I’d like to use the for napoleonic and ever earlier if possible (this will depend on the road colour mostly). The main motivation (if I needed any) is a modern tournament here in Auckland in Feburary. I want to have enough tiles done to cover a 8x6ft table and maybe more.

Board materials

Closeup of the tiles

I’m going to use 2x2ft interlocking foam tiles (which are used as kids play mats) and I’ll mount the on 4.75mm MDF. I will make hex shaped areas on my boards plain (no flock) so that I can add removeable terrain features like towns, forest, woods, fields etc. and I will also make plain areas (flocked but no details) where I can add farms, small villages and other smaller items. Some terrain will be fixed including hills, rivers, roads, streams, ponds and a coast line.

Some of the other pieces like hills will have a clear area on the top, where I can add features like a cell phone tower, wind turbine, stone circles, temples, monastries and windmils.

I’m planning to make some new towns for the terrain boards and these will be no larger than 300x300mm and a hex shape (this seems to be the most flexible for joining road and I can rotate pieces. There will be 1 main section per town with 2 – 5 smaller pieces and I can use the pieces as smaller towns if required. I will have about 6 different shapes but they should fit together pretty well as a hexagon can be divided up easily. I’ll post some pictures of the template I have to give you an idea of what I mean. The terrain pieces to go in these wont necessarily fill the whole area so I will have filler bases (eg fields, parks). Also there will be roads which will enter all in the same place for each blank area.

This lets me create cool things like ditches next to roads, sunken terrain, good looking water ways, gullys, folds and so on. I’ll also have individual trees (with pins in the trunks) which i can stab into the terrain and can put them anywhere (I might try and do this for power poles, lampposts etc.

I have a few buildings painted already and I’m finishing off my airfield buildings (there will be a small airfield on one of the tiles). Most of my large towns wll be paper buildings but I will still use a few resin and scratchbuilt ones and i’ll mount what I have already finished on the new bases to save time.

Thats all for now. I’ll post some pictures of some of the materials and town sectors plans I used probably tomorrow. And I’ll keep updating this thread with progress.