Tuesday, July 4, 2023

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.

3 comments:

  1. I am surprised by the color difference in the Green Blend. I have been using that for many years as well. I have noticed that much color differentiation but seems the composition changed years back. Have your old tiles simply faded?

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    Replies
    1. I am sure that there has been some fading, but I had a container that I used for the green blend dating back to at least 1989, and had last added to it for a project in 2017. It was much more similar to the old tiles, rather than the new bag of flock.

      You can see a little difference between the upper middle tiles and the ones in the upper right in the second photo above. The green from tiles done in 1998 seems more saturated, a little deeper in color, but it doesn't stand out particularly. The 2017 flock seems similar to those older tiles. It was stored in a plastic container, in a dry, cool space, while the tiles were subject to much greater changes in humidity over the years and were exposed to dust and handling.

      I've noted that the yellows and browns had changed over the years as well, but not nearly so much as the green blend. I suspect that they may have changed the ratio of darker green flock that they add to it, but it could be the result of other factors.

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  2. I like the new flocked tile. The woodland scenic flock was like chewed up sponge material.

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