An Epiphany! Well I think it was one!

I've got an unusual title for this entry, more of that later. I thought I'd update progress on the terrain. The hills are now all done and I have enough material to do about another 40 of the things! Anyone short of good quality high density urethane?
The first piccy shows the main ridge that will be used for games like Waterloo, Austerlitz etc. It is 4.5 metres long, 14 1/2 feet for old imperial guys like me. It is in 4 parts, the centre sections being somewhat heavy and all the joins within a section have been biscuited and glued. When the whole ridge is put together, biscuits are used to help keep the centre sections aligned.

The main ridge is really a specialist piece and the typical large hills of which I have 2 are a more conservative 2.5 metres in length, about 7 1/2 feet.

These hills would be good for a Bautzen type game. In addition, I have about 15 other hills that can be used individually or some can be used to make a third tier for either of the above. That's how the sunken road at Waterloo would be represented.

All the hills and boards are simply painted. I then started to look at the texturing and dry brushing. I started with a small hill to see what it was like using masonry paint and fine sand (stuff used for goldfish bowls). The hills looked fine and I even tried a part of a large hill. Then I tried the main board on one side and it proved inordinately difficult. I couldn't get an even spread of the sand/paint mix and it looked really odd, even when dry brushed. So I needed to think on it and that same night I got out the first real Wargames book I ever read, The War Game by Charles Grant, 1971. And then the Epiphany (or madness as its a fine line between the two).
The Charles Grant book is an 18c battle and the terrain is very simple and simply painted, much to where I am now. The figures he used looked fine against such a background, clear bright colours and the fact that there was no texturing doesn't detract, if anything the opposite. Then I realised I hadn't taken all om painted figures and put them on a clear painted board with the hills. I know from my earlier days that 20mm WWII figures and kit "gets lost" in good textured terrain. Moreover, 28mm Napoleonics work with textured terrain because of the size of the figures.
So I tried the experiment of having the figures on textured bases, but on a plain coloured board. Its astonishing to me. I never realised that if I put the 10mm next to textured terrain, you begin to "lose" the figures "in the terrain". Put them on a plain board and the obvious change in contrast makes a humongous difference.
A friend of mine, Neil, was coming with supplies of tanks and then I thought I'd ask him.



The coffee is to recuperate Neil. Gobsmacked doesn't describe his initial thoughts! I'm just getting over his shock! He thinks its absolutely fantastic and I agree with him. The strategy is to now have the terrain a blank green, including hills and woods and keep the contrast to the figures, figure bases and some terrain like roads themselves and villages.

What do the figures look like? Well, we are still learning with the camera, but this gives you a flavour.



The Dutch Lancers of the Guard, 178 figures, easily picking out all the colours and detail, like grey horses for the trumpeters, the standard bearer, Colonel, plumes and even the cross on top of the Czapska.

Next is more terrain and WWII tanks.

Ridges & Hills

Well,
the tables were all painted with a first coat of green base paint. At the same time we realised we had quite a few off cuts of 18mm MDF. The initial plan was to do the the hills in mainly high density urethane but we thought we'd use up the MDF.

The result was a complete surprise. 18mm MDF is difficult to grind/saw/cut an angle on it to give a decent looking slope. We managed to get 45 degrees and were then left with a solution that involved a drill with a carborundum tip to grind the slope shallower. This would take an age as the bit is only about 40mm across and the chuck limits the angle.

Then John saw a device on the internet, a new grinding wheel that fits a normal hand grinder. It comes from Croatia and looks like a cheese grater.

Would it work? The results are astonishing! Look at the first piccy. The ridge you are looking at is about 8 feet long and 1 foot wide. The slopes are roughly 3" long as you can see the virgin MDF after the cut. The angle is about 14 degrees!!!! Looks brilliant for 10mm scale. On top you can see the shaped urethane for the next contour. The grinder also does this and as it is 6mm thick, the slope area is dropped to 2".

Now the biggy!
The large ridge, you are viewing the back of this, is about 15 feet long and made the same way. It will be in 4 sections, joined side by side. It will do for any major Napoleonic/ACW/Marlburian battle and probably others. There is also space for a 3rd contour, which will be removable, and even a fourth. The possibilities of design are many.
Does any of this slide about. No, it grips quite tightly. If anything moving things has to be done with great care.

Lastly for today, a little piccy of little hills, mainly for WWII.  The colour looks different because of the angle/light but it shows how easily the hill should blend into the table when all receives final coats, texture and dry brushing. The plateau part of the hill is finished and I need a wide angle lens, again, to show better detail. Just believe me that in real life, it works.
Next will hopefully be finished ridges!

One Milestone done!

It feels slightly strange, but the base tables are complete. All that is left is for edge beading on the MDF, both for the table and the shelving.
The piccy, with me in the corner shows part of about 400 square feet of gaming area and 600 square feet of under table storage area.
The next job is to do the hills, big hills (about 16' long) and woods and and.................
But there is light at the end of the tunnel!!

In the meantime, I've switched a light fitting from reflector type to diffuser type to see what difference it makes to the light nearer the walls and outer tables. I will also experiment with no covers at all.
Off to the York show on Sunday, lots of people to see and talk roads, villages, tanks, cavalry and more megalomania!

I still hope to have the first game at Easter.

If anyone is interested in any detail of how to do this stuff, from building to table to terrain, let me know and I'll explain what I can.

Reinforcements Deploy

Its been a few weeks since my last update. We last saw the Situation room with table material arriving and a snapshot of the steel supports.

Well, there has been a change! The first piccy is out of focus but shows a technical me checking the alignment of the steel. Actually, it isn't Anne wanted me to look as if I knew what I was doing. Alas, all the technical expertise is being furnished by my neighbour John, an artisan extraordinaire to say the least! He's most happy surrounded by dirt and thinking of how to solve the next technical puzzle. Some of his solutions are brilliant!

The next shot shows a full size table with all the main supports. The legs are 4" x 4" timber and there are 5 sets on 6' centres (2 metres to metric guys). The strength is enormous and it also means that using the steel results in only using 40% of the timber had I used an all timber construction.

The little white patch under each leg is white concrete paint to seal the floor. The next stage was to mount the MDF, only 2 sheets per 24' length. It takes 5 guys to lift the stuff!!!

So now you have a large table with a single join if you can spot it? At this point the areas of floor under the tables was also painted with sealant paint leaving only the walkways unpainted. These will remain unpainted for another 6 months to allow the water in the concrete to continue evaporating. The dehumidifier sucks out about 2 litres of water a day. Added to this is that as we use the timber, it has all been tannelised and so is "wet2 and this of course needs time to dry out.
Now the tables actually look like tables. The MDF has also been painted underneath to ensure it is sealed as MDF will always produce dust if not sealed. All the MDF we use has been sealed on all surfaces with emulsion paint except the shelving on the main tables. This is laminated MDF and the edging will be with capped plastic.
The last piccy this time shows the tables with their base coat of paint.

All the base coats are green done with BS standard 12 D 45 which is Sherwood Forest Green Vinyl Matt emulsion. Always use a BS standard as you then can always replicate the colour everywhere. All troop basing uses a base colour which is the same. The thing in the middle is a saw, it saw a lot of work cutting the shelving parts. I'll explain more in the next installment.
In addition, the figure front develops. All the initial WWII is with the painter and should be ready for Easter. I might also have purchased all the ACW by Easter, to be painted later in the year. The Napoleonics is ongoing, I now have 4 full French infantry regiments. I hope to game something Napoleonic late in the year.
And at long last I have got the WWII rules to the printer and they shall be ready next week.
All in all I'm knackered!, I've used muscles in the last 3 weeks that I forgot I had (and aren't they telling me now!!). But all of this is really exciting, seeing something start from a bare patch of grass and grow to fulfill a dream.
Like all things good there are some hiccups and the ever present financial pressures, but I can really see what it might be like now and any doubts I may have had are going.
I'll do another later this week when hopefully the build is nearly finished and I'll even put some figures on the table to give an impression of the overall scale.
Watch this space!!!!!!

Reinforcements Arrive!

Well, following suggestions from both my wife and son, I've started to include pictures of the inside of the building to show progress.

All of the pictures are taken from the front left hand corner as you look at the building from previous posts. The room is 30' 3" long and 24' 6" wide. As you look at the far end you can see 3 double glazed windows, the centre window being able to full open its whole size.
Immediately to the left in the picture are MDF sheets leaning against the wall. These are 8' x 4' and will be used for the narrow side tables that will be 24' long and about 2' wide. The white sheets further down against the wall are melamine coated 10' x 4' MDF sheets. These will be used as shelving under the main tables. They are ready to go and require no additional work except to cut and then pin/glue edge tapes to finish the job.
In the centre of the piccy are more MDF sheets. The top 2 are melamine coated but underneath are the main MDF sheets for the centre tables which will be 24' x 6'.  They are 25mm and weigh a ton, took 5 guys to get them in! You can also see the lighting, just. There are a total of 8 x 5' twin natural light fittings with reflectors. They are positioned to be over the centre of the main centre tables so that there is no shadowing.
The whole room is painted brilliant white and is insulated. The concrete floor will the last job finished. I will leave it until Easter before finally completely painting it and carpeting it.

The above piccy is by panning to the right from the first piccy. What you see is a trestle with the main steel (yes steel) support beams. There are 8 of them, 2 for each table section and each is roughly 24' 6" long and 60mm x 40mm x 3mm thick. Just underneath you can see a MIG welding machine. We are welding lugs onto the steel to take the main timbers. I've used steel to cut down on timber leg supports. All the tables will have leg supports on 6' centres. It also means that as the main table is only in 2 pieces, alignment should be easier.

Panning further to the right gives a feel for the lengths of steel. A de-humidifier sits in the background. Believe it or not, the concrete should be given 200 days to let it dry out. This is based on the fact that it is lined underneath and allowing a day per mm of concrete for drying. The de-humidifier helps speed this process.

And lastly, but not least and what this is all for, the first troops are based. Apart from awaiting their eagles, you are looking at 2 regts of infantry, 6 btns, the 3rd Ligne in the foreground and the 18th Ligne in the background. Each base has a computer generated identification label as does their position in the storage tray. There are 684 figures in the piccy, 114 per btn (nearly squeezed them all into the frame!). This time next year I hope to have nearer 160 btns!

Situation in the "Situation Room"

Unfortunately there are no new piccies. I'm struggling to get into town to see the "correct guy" at the camera shop to go through what lens I need for 10mm figures, both close work and distant. I hope to have piccies in the near future.

The room itself suffered a hiccup! Water!!!!!! Unfortunately, converting a garage to a "house" has a few niggles and this one was unforeseen by myself and others. Simply put, water got between the surrounding flags and the cement, forced it ways to the concrete base and then as it had nowhere else to go, tracked into the building. Its worst at the door because the door was set incorrectly as no mastic was used!!!!!!!
Looking at it, the water must amount to less than a cup full of water.

The cure looks OK. The flags had to come up and I thought this would be difficult. It was done withing 30 minutes. Then the magic gunk, a paint called Bituthene which is effectively a liquid bitumen. It seemed to the trick and water ingress appears to have halted. We just need 3 dry days to then give it a second coat and put the flags back.

On positive notes, the room is insulated, painted and all electric & lighting are in. I hope to start on the tables next week with my neighbour John who is going to do the tables. I'll do a separate post on that. Troops are now arriving, I have 6 Btns French infantry painted and based and just awaiting flags from GMB which are on order.

Next month should also see all the WWII kit being ordered from Pendraken and I've sourced where the roads and rivers will come from and possibly even village bases. All I need now are the buildings themselves. To accelerate figure acquisition I'm also likely to use Neil in Bangladesh, turn round of 9000 figures in 9 weeks is not to be ignored!

I've acquired all new dice, I need to do things like musket sticks and I still hope to gaming around Easter next year.

I'll take some piccies of the inside and talk my through the building of the tables and why I chose the method that you will see.

The WWII rules will get published in January and the Yahoo Group site supporting it will be brought up to date.

Ged

The "Situation Room" secure

Hi All. I last left the Situation room with a roof on. Since then things have progressed. The job that was done next was to render the outside. This is a two part process. Initially, a coarse render is applied that is up to a 1/2" thick. The reason for doing this was to create the "proper" water seal for the building. Noel commented on what appeared to be a lot of problems for a prefabricated building. I agree in the sense that I'm trying to take something for one purpose and make it fit for another. As a garage, it would be fine (but would need a very big car!) but once its insulated (unlike the original) then it must be water tight. The next piccy shows the first layer of coarse render.

This took a day to put on. Fortunately, September has been good weather and it was sufficiently dry to allow the fine render to go on the next day. This is similar in thickness. However, it takes two guys a day to do it. I never knew that render, or concrete for that matter, was polished. But it is. And the above render is done with graded trowels ending up with a steel one. The finished rendered building is below. At the same time I've included the progress on the flags for around the building and the new path. The Situation room was looking good. 

So there you have it, a nice looking building. This left two jobs to do. Painting it was an obvious choice and thankfully the weather was still on our side. Anne helped me paint the building and it took two and a half days. I always use a masonry paint, always Sandtex. Two coats were applied and we were fortunate because it did rain shortly after finishing the painting on the second day but the paint managed to cling on OK.

The last job was to redo the ridge line. As I said in earlier posts, the ridge line was essentially a tin cover, the cover being about 3mm thick and then the gaps in the eaves filled with a foam. The final part was to replace this with a proper ridge tile made of the same material as the roof panels and have it bedded in. The gable ends were also lead flashed, primarily to guard against capillary action of water moving inside in time of snow.

So here is the finished article (fingers crossed!).

I now need to get a new camera lens for taking piccies of the troops which have started to fill the ranks!