Some Barbed Wire

My daughter's project is still occupying my game table, so this weekend, I resigned myself to making some barbed wire sections for 15mm games.  Something I've long been meaning to do.

Pretty generic, but here's a couple of pics for lack of anything better to share:

With old Quality Castings 15mm WWII Soviets.

In all, there is about seven and a half feet of total length.  Not sure if this will be enough, but at least it is a good start.

I was going to weather it a bit, but it occured to me that in the first few games in which I will use it, it will likely be representing wire that was layed only days to hours prior to the battles.  For now, it will reamin pretty shiny.

Some Stone Walls

No game this weekend, as my table was occupied with a non-hobby project.  But, I did confiscate the dining room table to work on a little project that has been on the list for some time.

Every now and then, I come across pictures of fields separated by stone walls consisiting of loose filed stone thrown into a sort of continuous pile.  I've been meaning to make some to give a little contrast in the types of dressing for the table top and finally got around to it.

Method of construction was pretty simple; I started with .06" plastic bases, primed, glued aquarium stone in two applications to build the sort of parmid shaped walls using craft glue, then painted and flocked.

Not a complex process, but a little time consuming given the overall scope of the work.  At least I can check it off the list. Here are a few pics: 

There are 30 pieces, with the long sections being 4" 

in length.

With 15mm Quality Castings WWII Infantry.

A little closer view.

That's all for now.

Finally Completed My Terrain Work

After almost three weeks, I've completed the re-flocking of all of my "green terrain' 1' square foam tiles, an utterly unrewarding project from the motivational side of things.  The process would have moved along a bit faster if weather hadn't kept the humidity up through much of that time, severely slowing the drying process.

Anyway, here's a pic of the the tiles stacked by type on the table:

I happily discovered that I had previously done many of the 2'x2' tiles when I was making the West German terrain,  and do have a small number of 1'x2' and 2'x2' tiles to do yet, but will do them over a weekend, when the weather is more agreeable, rather than rather than kill another couple of eeks watching glue dry right now.

Now to get World War III back on the table top.

Doing Some Terrain Work

Last week, in addition to exploring early period Star trek games, I decided to take care of another task in preperation for my Barbarossa campaign later this year.  I still have a bunch (maybe 150 square feet) of moduler terrain that needed to be re-flocked to match all of the newer stuff I made over the last couple of years.

I discussed the color change over the yars in the Woodland Scenics flock sometime back, and figured that now was as good as ever to do the mass re-flocking.

While looking at the foam, I noticed that many of the edges could use some touch up paint, and there were still some bare blue foam edges here and there from my hurry to get terrain on the table in decades past.  It isn't important with respect to usng the terrain, but just looks sloppy, and in some cases makes it hard to see the labeling system that I use on the edges of the foam to assist in finding the right terrain tiles for set up.

The process consisted of patching any missing bits of foam with light weight spackle, painting most of the edges, and then re-applying flock to the terrain tiles.

Here are a couple of pics of the process:

Shortly after starting, the tiles with the white on them have

 lite weight spackle drying, filling finger tip "craters" left 

by a couple of the guys leaning on the terrain back in the 

late 1980s.

A comparison of the WS Green Blend flock 

old and new,  The hill slope tile in front has 

been newly flocked; with older stream tiles 

behind dating to 1990 and 1998.

Not the most fun or interesting thing to do, but necessary, and I can check it off the list if I ever get done.  Thus far, I've re-flocked 54 of the approximately 120 1'x1' terrain tiles.  

We have had several storms in recent days, dropping huge amounts a rainfall.  I don't know the official amount, but we have a little wading pool on the patio for my granddaughter, and it is now filled to the lip with about 10 inches of rain water.  It was empty last Monday.

In any event, this has resulted in a very humid basement, despite the dehumidifier filling up several times, and I started with the most tedious pieces to re-do, the stream and river tiles.  Progress has been slower than hoped, but should get faster as the tiles get easier to finish.

I'm still probably stuck with this ont he table for another ten days or so.  The bigger 1'x2' and 2'x2' tiles are going to wait for awhile yet.