Monday, June 9, 2014

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.


4 comments:

ColCampbell50 said...

Nice start.

I have some of Dave Graffam's buildings. They go together well. I used card matte board as the walls with corner reinforcements and glued the buildings to individual bases. Even with removable roofs they are sturdy enough for gaming and storage. See links below for several uses of them in my games:

http://colcampbellbarracks.blogspot.com/2014/06/seizing-supplies.html
http://colcampbellbarracks.blogspot.com/2013/11/very-british-civil-war-at-colonial.html

Jim

Rodger said...

Nice work so far Jon. Very keen to watch this project grow!

BaronVonJ said...

These are looking good. My only negative (and it's a little one) is that they are too straight and perfect for little guys digging with shovels. A little more variation in width and not so perfect turns would really take this to the next level.

Jon F said...

Thanks for the comments (ColCampbell, I like your Graffam stuff a lot. I've done some of those same ones and love them). When I move on to making more sections I'll make some pie shaped pieces to break up the rigid lines and some more straights with varied widths.