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.