A Mission up the River

 

Well here are some pictures of my progress towards making some more terrain boards to add to my collection, and it this case building upon my experience I gained from building the first two lots. My first attempt at building terrain boards and the resulting tutorial/diary that I posted about building the boards can be found here.

 As you can see, even back then in 2008 I was keen on making a riverine delta terrain board. While what I did was good, it has some limitations due to my assumptions about what I thought would work size wise for a river suitable figures between 6 and 15mm.

Also, as my skill increased from the the experience  so my techniques evolved from the process of working of building 39 boards, and my most recent tutorial can be seen here. However, since then I have acquired some new tools, which have had a considerable impact on how I constructing the new set of boards.

These have to be the best foam cutting tools I've bought. Previous wire cutters being rather Heath Ronbinsonish affairs where the wire would break, and the power source required obscure battery sizes to run the tool. These one's from the Foam Factory actually work, doing exactly what they say on the packet. Not cheap though.

So above is the first stage of cutting the contour shapes for some hills that I wanted to add to the existing set I have, and give my terrain more flexibility in how I could lay it out. And below is how they looked after I had sculpted the contours using my new tools

As you can hopefully see from this I no longer have stepped contours that need to be filled with filler to get a smooth transition and slope for the models to stand on. Less filler means lighter boards that are still strong enough to stand on, if necessary.

Finally, I started work on my riverine delta expansion set. As can be seen the rivers are much wider, nearly the full width of the boards in fact, but I've been able to sculpt some transition pieces that will allow these to be used with my original river boards too.

Obviously, still quite a way to go with these as I need to add texture with filler over the top of the foam contours I've sculpted. I also plan to spray them first before adding the filler to prevent the warping that occurred to my series one boards when I first started building terrain three years ago. This trick I discovered by a process of trial and error after spraying  some town boards and noticing that they didn't warp. Spray car primer prevents kappa board from warping when wet.

So Vietnam riverine warfare here I come...