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Im making my first board and I was wondering how to make trenches in the board, how they are designed, how to make pill boxes, and artillery/ machine gun pits in the board itself easily. Cheers!

You'd have to make a raised board out of insulation foam, and cut trenches with a hot wire cutter.

Note that you cannot paint this insulation with an aerosol spray can; it will melt it. You must paint it by hand.

http://www.amera.co.uk/product.php?range=s Could the trench battlefield be used?

I'm not sure if the scale is right; I think it may be too small. I'm pretty awful at estimating scale though so someone else should weigh in, it's about 22x30 inches.

Yea trenches may be a bit much for my first board I think I might make a city of death instead.

Do yourself a favour and do the trenches yourself. Make some test runs first so you have an idea of the work that goes into it. My test worked pretty dan well, but never made it whole because that is involved and really locks up the board, and you need to be able to protect that much foam.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery/images-38250-32730_Necrons%20For%20Sale.html

You can see my test there. Lessons learnd:
1. Carving a trench out of blue foam is a sad and terrible idea.
2. Get a hot wire cutter
3. Get the long thin coffee stir sticks. Some Popsicle sticks are okay.
4. Add another layer of foam on bottom so she'll holes in trench can have collected water.
5. Really take time to landscape the spoil heaps
6. Add a fire-step, or make it much more run-down cheap scale looking. Must have all the trimmings or be the slap-dash start of a trench. Work-in-progress for full-blown trench is okay, what it have there is not.
7. Make more room for models. Terminator won't fir into most of that trench.
8. Abuse the foam for down-slope. By sloping everything down and putting things there, you can make terrain modules to go over stuff and it will still sit flush on your board

I am not a troglodyte and can grammar and spell. This worthless piece of trash iPad rhinks it knows better. I have long since giv up trying to correct anything I write with my iPad.

 lilgammer123 wrote:
Yea trenches may be a bit much for my first board I think I might make a city of death instead.

Trenches are just as easy and expensive as a City of Death. Except for 1 thing: Trenches actually give you ground where typically people who buy cities of death break before actually buying the Realm of Battle Cityscape from Forgeworld to put them on.

And honestly, that thing makes things both more expensive and harder than a trench board. To make a trench board all you really need to do is slice alleys into foam. Nothing could be simpler. I recommend you do precisely that. Get some popsicle sticks and line the walls with them. There are other materials you can find to add more variation to the walls but at that point it's luxury. It really is that easy.

Painting any board will be tedious, you're not escaping that no matter what you do.

Use wooden coffee stirrers for planking.
Cut bits out of the insulation (or even use spray primer to roughen the surface - as the pink or blue stuff is denser it can take it without totally dissolving).
Make some texture paint by dumping some sand into some standard house emulsion paint & slap it on.
This will protect the insulation from further damage & then prime away.

I thought you might find this tutorial interesting.

 lilgammer123 wrote:
http://www.amera.co.uk/product.php?range=s Could the trench battlefield be used?

Yup, those trenches are too small. However, amera do make bigger ones here - http://www.amera.co.uk/product.php?range=z

I have a set and they're pretty good after a bit of weathering - used in this a battle report here - http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/574542.page

I'm might get the bigger trenches and cut the hills out.

 bubber wrote:
Use wooden coffee stirrers for planking.
Cut bits out of the insulation (or even use spray primer to roughen the surface - as the pink or blue stuff is denser it can take it without totally dissolving).
Make some texture paint by dumping some sand into some standard house emulsion paint & slap it on.
This will protect the insulation from further damage & then prime away.

i want to caveat this and re-iterate what I'd mentioned. There are two kinds of wooden stirrers. One are repurposed posicle sticks, the other are the thin long sticks that you can't touch the cup with while stirring or you will have wood splinters in you drink. You want the thin ones.

http://antonswargame.blogspot.com/2012/02/to-blue-foam-beyond.html I might use the wire cutter design.

 poda_t wrote:
Do yourself a favour and do the trenches yourself. Make some test runs first so you have an idea of the work that goes into it. My test worked pretty dan well, but never made it whole because that is involved and really locks up the board, and you need to be able to protect that much foam.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery/images-38250-32730_Necrons%20For%20Sale.html

You can see my test there. Lessons learnd:
1. Carving a trench out of blue foam is a sad and terrible idea.
2. Get a hot wire cutter
3. Get the long thin coffee stir sticks. Some Popsicle sticks are okay.
4. Add another layer of foam on bottom so she'll holes in trench can have collected water.
5. Really take time to landscape the spoil heaps
6. Add a fire-step, or make it much more run-down cheap scale looking. Must have all the trimmings or be the slap-dash start of a trench. Work-in-progress for full-blown trench is okay, what it have there is not.
7. Make more room for models. Terminator won't fir into most of that trench.
8. Abuse the foam for down-slope. By sloping everything down and putting things there, you can make terrain modules to go over stuff and it will still sit flush on your board

I am not a troglodyte and can grammar and spell. This worthless piece of trash iPad rhinks it knows better. I have long since giv up trying to correct anything I write with my iPad.

What's wrong with the blue insulation foam?

I actually prefer it over pink for my sketch models because it's a bit denser, for sculpting denser is better from my experience. I won't even use anything less dense than high density surf board foam for assignments that matter anymore.

 Zuul wrote:


What's wrong with the blue insulation foam?

I actually prefer it over pink for my sketch models because it's a bit denser, for sculpting denser is better from my experience. I won't even use anything less dense than high density surf board foam for assignments that matter anymore.

Might be mistaken - but I think he is talking about carving versus slicing. Carving out that much foam would be a PITA. Cutting it out isn't bad at all.

Regarding the color of the foam - it doesn't make any difference. You want to pay attention to the grade/density of the foam. If you are buying extruded polystyrene foam, it is all the same material chemically whether it is blue, pink, yellow, even things like the foam food strays that come in blacks, reds and greens will be extruded Styrofoam (handy when you need thin stuff). The important thing is to make sure that it is in fact Styrofoam and not another imposter like Polyisocyanurate or Polythene foams - and save yourself the hassle and avoid expanded polystyrene as that stuff is nothing but a nightmare.

The density though is related to its use generally speaking (not fully - but mostly). Subgrade panels will be much denser than those which are designed for sheeting insulating between studs which is denser than the foam designed for retrofit insulation projects. Most the foam you pick up off the shelf at big box stores like Lowes and Home Depot will be the retrofit grade. It is somewhat more compressible in order to deal with irregularities of a house that is 30 years old. Probably the stiffest of the commonly available XPS foams is Certifoam. That is not too far off working with products like 5 pcf Balsa-Foam. With the others - you can special order sheets of the subgrade material like Foamular 400 from lumber yards. For the big daddy of them - you can get sheets of stuff like Foamular 1000, which has a 100 PSI compressive strength that I use when making game boards for public game spaces. I can actually stand on a 1 inch sheet of that without any supports without it breaking and edges are nearly impossible to break off in normal use. It comes with a price tag that is about 10 times higher than regular big box sheets though (about $100 per sheet the last time I bought some - though there was some special order freight on that too whereas 400 costs about $45 and regular 150 costs around $10 per sheet).

_________________________


Anywho, back to the trenches. IMO, trench tables are a good bit less...or more work than an urban board. At the simplest implementation, you can make an OK looking trench board on a shoestring budget over the course of a weekend. There is less refinement needed, and most the parts used to put one together can be picked up for pretty cheap. Mistakes can easily be hidden under debris and craters, and the final finish need not be overly detailed as the trenches and everything between them tends to become a uniform color of bleh.

Urban on the other hand have more ready made options. Whether you look at GW's buildings or look towards Pegasus or another company - you have kits. These come at a price though, and in order to populate the same size board densely you will spend a lot more. If you choose to scratch build them - well, that will save you some but even there, the raw materials needed, tools and skill level is much higher. Mistakes can be dealt with - but if you have a row of windows that are not quite square or some other problem, it is difficult to fix without starting over. Finishing and details tend to be more complicated as even in a bombed out city you will have sections that are still standing fairly well and those little details take time to sort out.

For a first go - I would say tackle the trench board. Take your time to plan it so that you can do a modular arrangement and don't build yourself a single purpose board, otherwise it will end up becoming a dust collector. You can even work your way into an urban board by doing the trench board to start with and stepping in modules to a city under siege (trenches on one side, city on the other, no man's land in between) and finally full on city fighting. This will allow you to build your skills and expand your terrain collection in more manageable bites as opposed to choking on an expensive project all in one go.

 Zuul wrote:

 poda_t wrote:
Do yourself a favour and do the trenches yourself. Make some test runs first so you have an idea of the work that goes into it. My test worked pretty dan well, but never made it whole because that is involved and really locks up the board, and you need to be able to protect that much foam.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery/images-38250-32730_Necrons%20For%20Sale.html

You can see my test there. Lessons learnd:
1. Carving a trench out of blue foam is a sad and terrible idea.
2. Get a hot wire cutter
3. Get the long thin coffee stir sticks. Some Popsicle sticks are okay.
4. Add another layer of foam on bottom so she'll holes in trench can have collected water.
5. Really take time to landscape the spoil heaps
6. Add a fire-step, or make it much more run-down cheap scale looking. Must have all the trimmings or be the slap-dash start of a trench. Work-in-progress for full-blown trench is okay, what it have there is not.
7. Make more room for models. Terminator won't fir into most of that trench.
8. Abuse the foam for down-slope. By sloping everything down and putting things there, you can make terrain modules to go over stuff and it will still sit flush on your board

I am not a troglodyte and can grammar and spell. This worthless piece of trash iPad rhinks it knows better. I have long since giv up trying to correct anything I write with my iPad.

What's wrong with the blue insulation foam?

I actually prefer it over pink for my sketch models because it's a bit denser, for sculpting denser is better from my experience. I won't even use anything less dense than high density surf board foam for assignments that matter anymore.

there's a difference between carving it OUT of the foam, and CARVING the foam. Very big difference. One method gives you chunks flying everywhere that take you one week of vacuuming and sweeping to clean up. The other gives you nothing but 100% recyclable and reusable materials.

d'urk! beaten to it by sean. Sean has the right of it.