I'm back from a family event in southern Florida, with long road-trips through the south-eastern states there and back. Travel takes its toll and I feel like ten miles of rocky road - but! The mailman delivered my Pendraken ECW order today!
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| ECW shinies in all their glory. |
In the meantime, I'm going to press on with a new project - river sections for the tabletop. These are an experiment I'm trying out, using lengths of clear plastic packaging material bound with thin strips of wood as stiffeners. The aim is to make the banks as low profile as possible so they don't stand too proud of the table surface. I'm toying with the idea of sealing off the ends with masking tape and pouring a thin layer of Envirotex Lite epoxy varnish mixed with a little blue acrylic ink onto the plastic. Once the varnish has set the tape is removed. The varnish should stick in place and show the surface beneath (which will be either green or brown anyway - both natural river colours), tinted a watery blue colour by the ink.
The banks are covered with liquid nails adhesive, the kind you get in those cartridges that fit inside an extruder gun. I press this down (it takes a bit of work to get the stuff to stick to the surface, but perseverance pays), then sprinkle sand on top and press that into the adhesive. In the photo above are (left-right) the basic piece of clear plastic, a piece with the wooden splints glued into place using epoxy adhesive, and a piece with liquid nails smeared on and sanded. I used green sand to show the effect more clearly in the photo, but I'll use plain sand, paint and flock to get the final result. The section above is a river bend in the making.
I've cut enough sections to stretch over five feet - the width of my gaming board plus a foot or so of bends and so on. The river should work in either N-scale as a river, or in larger scales as a stream. An N-scale bridge and ford will make an appearance somewhere once I've worked out my ideas on how to make the sections.
2 comments:
A word of warning about the ECW, sir . . . There is a wonderful amount of period information available . . . and sooner or later you are going to find out that you want to know more about some of the people your Pendrakens are representing.
Of course we don't have all of the information that we (as wargamers) want (such as flag and uniform information on every unit), it is still a fascinating period of history.
So ENJOY the ECW, AJ, you will have fun.
-- Jeff
Very true, Jeff. I did game the period in 6mm many moons ago, after experiencing a thoroughly enjoyable ECW game at my (then) local wargames club. The project kind of fell by the wayside, but my interest was reignited recently by all the nice photos and information online, and especially by my friend M J Logue's Hollie Babbitt series of novels.
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