First World War terrain boards SECTION 3 (TRENCH) updated 11th October

[thejammedgatling]

Well, I finally jumped in at the deep end and began making my First World War gaming table. Inspired by AirCav, the Captain and a few others. A few weeks ago I had cut up 16 600x600 units which were 6mm MDF, and took them to a foam place which accurately cut the 40mm polystyrene and used a spray contact adhesive to mount them to the panels. That was the easy part done.

One of the hardest decisions was which part of the Western Front I wanted to embark on. Some years ago while a student I embarked on a three month stint in Belgium and France researching the old battlefields and making copious drawings and photographs of them. But they are quite different places..the soil colour, field layouts, elevation (or lack of). I was very tempted to take on the fields of Passchendaele and try to re-create something thoroughly chewed up by artillery with shattered duckboard tracks and muddy mess like a Paul Nash painting. I suppose the playability of this type of board however put me off a little. So I returned to the rolling chalk uplands of the Somme. I liked the effect of the trench lines, shellholes and earthworks showing up like scars across the green fields, with sunken lanes and small farmlets dotted around. It also has it's share of streams and canals to play with as well.

So I began with a four board layout of some farmland connected by small lanes, which has been bombarded but have not yet become front line trenches. Some of the shellholes I decided to connect up like hastily constructed earthworks..possibly by forward scouting units digging in until reinforcements arrive or a withdrawing rearguard.. I probably will make a 1917 style trench system at some point but I want reasonably fluid gameplay to start with. A small drainage ditch/ stream runs across two boards. They are built to work in different layouts, hence the road entry/ exit points are consistently on centre, and the stream dissapears into a culvert prior to the board edge. There will also be a few cobbled farmyard areas where later on I'll be putting some ruins.



So I got busy today with the knife and some sandpaper and have got this far:



The shellholes look quite dominant on the landscape! I may end up cutting a few of them out possibly. The crater rims were bonded back on with contact (hence the yellow goop) and I used a template for small and large craters to get some consistency.




Next step to sand down the craters a little and start to add some filler! Oh, and I have to add the hardboard edging for the boards to save the corners from being broken off!

I'll try to add more soon.

[traveller]

Wow! Look very promising. I need to do that also some day. So your full setup is 2400 x 2400 mm?

[Calimero]

Interesting indeed. I’m looking forward to see the evolution of this board.

[OSHIROmodels]

Looking good  I'd maybe cut out a couple of the craters and if you want more you could make another couple of boards that have had a heavier bombardment.

I'm interested to know about the foam place that stuck the foam to your boards. I know you are in Australia so company names won't be much good but the service might happen over here.

cheers

James

[Oliver]

Lovely! I wonder were this will go to... Looks brilliant!

Also make sure some of the craters are HUGE! I was at Vichy Ridge and had a look at this crater and it was about 4M deep 

[Captain Blood]

Brilliant! Lovely to see 
Keep us posted on progress.

Don't know if it helps, but I built a trench section a year or two ago.
Might provide some stimulus as to the look of the land?

Viz:



The original thread with lots more pics is here:
http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=4590.0


Cheers.

[Ray Earle]

Looking forward to seeing this progress. I'm in the process of making some WW1 scenery myself at the moment. 

[thejammedgatling]

Wow! Look very promising. I need to do that also some day. So your full setup is 2400 x 2400 mm?

With 16 boards I'd get a game table potentially 1200x 4800 (or 4' by 16' if you're that way inclined) or else 1800x 3000 (6' by 10'). However, with the full array of 24 boards it could be longer. The plan would eventually be to have a countryside section, a no-mans land with trenches and support trench section and a town section. I'm also working out plans for how to do the canal section to incorporate my bridge kit:

I'm interested to know about the foam place that stuck the foam to your boards. I know you are in Australia so company names won't be much good but the service might happen over here.


James

the place is just called foam sales. They sell polystyrene but also a host of other types of foams and cut up matresses with the stuff etc. They spray on the contact with a high pressure airgun which has the added advantage that the stuff is nearly dry when it hits the surface. Using the boards as a template is a great idea as it means that the edges of the polystyrene will be accurate to within a millimeter...much better than me hacking away with a breadknife! I'm racking my brains as I used to know a similar sort of place in Kingston..but it may well be gone by now. On the Richmond road I think. Try Yellow pages for foam matresses and you may well get lucky.

Lovely! I wonder were this will go to... Looks brilliant!

Also make sure some of the craters are HUGE! I was at Vichy Ridge and had a look at this crater and it was about 4M deep 

Thanks. The craters at Vimy and La Boiselle (among others) were mined and blown. The La Boiselle one in particular is HUGE. I laid a wreath there on July 1st on behalf of some of the families of several of the German soldiers killed there. The sight of the sun rising over the rim of the crater was awe inspiring. Now for that I'd have to be ordering 500mm thick foam....

Brilliant! Lovely to see 
Keep us posted on progress.

Don't know if it helps, but I built a trench section a year or two ago.
Might provide some stimulus as to the look of the land?

Viz:



The original thread with lots more pics is here:
http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=4590.0


Cheers.

Thanks Captain. I think these pics were some of the ones that made me eventually get my finger out. I love the details you put into them, especially all the detritus. I remember reading many accounts by soldiers who were shocked at just how messy the battlefield was with lots of paper, clothing, discarded food tins and bottles etc floating around. I'll probably incorporate more of this in my trench sections as you have done. Thanks for the inspiration!

[thejammedgatling]

So, the next stage. I cut some of the height from the craters and roughened them a little as they were too perfect in shape. That looked a little better. The tops of most of the craters were about between waist and shoulder height on a miniature.

For the next step i wanted to fill the gaps left around the bases of the craters where they were bonded to the boards, and also add some texture. For this I mixed up a load of filler with a couple of handfulls of crushed limestone from my garden (plenty of that in Western Australia)
,
 The advantage of that also was that as bits broke off the boards (as they invariably do as people drop tape measures) they would still show as white underneath. I applied the mix by hand and with a 1" brush, brushing outwards and up from the centre of the craters. This would I hoped give the effect of the great big slabs of rock being thrown out while the smaller pieces remained. I added some pva to the mix as well to give it some plasticity.

When that had dried I gave the whole thing two coats of paint. The colour I chose was a medium brown again mixed with pva. Basically the Somme sits on chalk covered by topsoil. As the shells hit they will burrow down through the topsoil and gouge out the chalk, leaving a mixture of the two at surface level, so even the mud would have a lighter shade.



When this had dried I decided as an afterthought to put some cobbled sections down as possible farmyard entrances or barn annexes where heavy machinery might be left without bogging. I used plastic sheet cobbles that I had picked up for half price some years ago and still have stacks of in the shed. I will do the edging on them later so that they blend in better.

Then time for the next coat. This was a caramel colour..the mid tone for the chalk areas which include the shellholes and the laneways. The drain will be kept as a darker soil colour, assuming that this would mostly be comprised of clay. As the mid brown coat had not yet dried in some areas it began to blend in and create mid-tones that I quite liked. I hair dryed it and gave a second, more drybrush coat.



I keep checking scale as I go along. Here's a Stormtrooper to gauge scale. It looks about right to me.





And here's the A7Z:



With the caramel down I had to let the whole thing dry, so I decided to experiment on an idea for the grass. I liked the effect of the long grasses done on the boards featured in the Great War rules and wanted to get something like this, but possibly also some wheat fields as well. I had shot down to the local fabric shop yesterday and rummaged around their fake fur section until I found something that I thought reminded me of tall grass. Only problem...it was BLUE. Oh well. I bought half a meter to test it.


So I dipped a small piece in a pot of paint thinned down with water..probably about half and half. I squeezed it several times so that the colour really did saturate it. Then I laid it flat on a piece of plywood and used a wire brush and a toothbrush to play with texture...brushing the grass flat or almost flat in differing directions to give the effect of being knocked over by the wind, shell concussion or trampled underfoot by soldiers perhaps. Here are the test pieces anyway, again with our friend the stormtrooper to add scale.



I won't know if this has truly worked until the morning when it is dry. I really want grass that holds it's shape (partly for drybrushing in the next step) but is still supple enough to 'settle' slightly under the weight of a figure, or else it will have practical problems for gameplay! If anyone out there has tried this method and has tips please advise!

So with everything drying I called it quits for the night..

[OSHIROmodels]

Looking very good so far, the paint is really bringing it together 

I'm racking my brains as I used to know a similar sort of place in Kingston..but it may well be gone by now. On the Richmond road I think. Try Yellow pages for foam matresses and you may well get lucky.

That might be the units behind the firestation next to Ham. I'll have a wander up there on Saturday.

cheers

James

[Belgian]

Keep up the good work, over to see more WIP's and progress!

the Belgian,

[Captain Blood]

The groundwork is looking great!
Can't wait to see how it turns out.

Am interested to see how the teddy bear fur blends in.

[OSHIROmodels]

Have a go at the teddy bear fur roughly with a set of clippers to try and get rid of the uniformity of the normal grass 

cheers

James

[thejammedgatling]

Have a go at the teddy bear fur roughly with a set of clippers
cheers

James

Good Lord sir! I would not have liked to have seen your teddy bear collection when you were a nipper. Were you still doing conversions back then?

Good idea though. I do have some hairdressers electric clippers somewhere. I think having gaps and patches in the grass would be more effective. One point of note when you cut this though...it goes EVERYWHERE! Worse than polystyrene!

[Hammers]

Smashing.