Trench Build Complete!

After about three weeks of work the trenchworks are complete and table ready. With the exception of them being a bit angular (again, I plan to make to make some additional pieces to break up the lines), I am very happy with how this project turned out. In the future instead of piecing together each section like I did, which was a lot of work, I will draw out the entire system on one or two pieces of foam and cut the individual sections after they've been glued to the Sintra and shaped.


Gluing down the shoring and planking.

Stained wood. For this I used a 10:2 mixture of black magic wash and burnt umber ink.

 Shoring and planking dry brushed with Ceramcoat Hippo Gray and flocked.

Finished!

I suppose I could use these for ACW late war stuff.

Trench Build Pt. 2

My trench project is going quite nicely and I already have ideas for future pieces such as more turns, gun emplacements, and command emplacements.  I have moved on to coating all the sections in a slurry of Durham's Water Putty, saw dust, and a mixture of dirt and small pieces of gravel swept up from my garage floor.


Sections with dried Durham's slurry

After the Durham's had dried (a few hours), I painted with a sample pint of brown acrylic wall paint I'd found on the clearance  shelf at Home Depot.  In addition, I sprinkled the floor of each section with the stuff I found on my garage floor. Most of this will be covered by planking, however I thought it would give a nice look for any dirt peeking through the planks. You can see a definitive styrofoam look to the walls, but this will all be covered in shoring. I have kicked around wattle fencing, but planking will be much faster and it'll look good enough for my purposes.

Stay tuned for drybrushing, planking/shoring, and flocking.

Trench Build Pt. 1

Over the past year I have dedicated the lion's share of my time painting little men and frankly need a rest from the brush.  Except for a few Bolt Action machine gun teams, I am going to spend what spare time I have this summer building up my inventory of terrain.  I am a big fan of Dave Graffam models.  In case you aren't familiar with Dave's work, he offers a nice selection of downloadable plans for constructing foamcore structures.  I chose to take advantage of Wargame Vault's Memorial Day sale on DG models, so I will be doing a tutorial on one of those soon.

For the next couple weeks I will be spending my time building a trenchworks for WW2 play (I suppose I could use for ACW too). I checked out a few different tutorials in order to get ideas, so nothing you see here is cutting-edge.  I chose to use polystyrene sections glued to Sintra(flexible PVC sheets).  I'm not sure what size Sintra I used since I didn't bother to measure, but I'm guessing it's  3mm. I have a source to get quite a bit of this stuff in sizable scrap pieces.  Enjoy and stay tuned for part 2.


For the first step I simply cut and shaped my polystyrene pieces.  Afterwards I laid them out on the Sintra and traced the shapes to be cut (on a bandsaw).

Here you can see the Sintra base pieces laid out after being cut.

For the next step I  glued the polystyrene to the base pieces. I chose Gorilla glue since it dries faster and is more secure than PVA or hot glue.

The glue had set enough after about an hour to start filling the gaps between pieces. In the smaller gaps I used Elmer's wood filler. For the larger gaps I chose resin sand. I just slopped this stuff on and smoothed out with no care because the entire berm will be lathered in Durham's Water Putty before painting.