In the process of basing a few bits of pipe terrain it became obvious that a toxic waste pool was required. Initially I was tempted to get one of the proper pour-it-out-water-scenery offerings but, partly because I didn’t want to spend money and partly because I couldn’t be bothered to go to the shops, I thought I’d try just using PVA glue.

But I ran out…

So instead I hunted around the garage for a suitable alternative and came up with some UniBond wood glue. It’s fairly thick stuff so I didn’t end up with it pouring through all the unfilled gaps at the bottom of the pool. Also it dries a really nasty yellow! To be honest it looks like toxic waste even without painting.

Not too shabby I reckon. I’d better get painting some more figures if I’m to fight off that lot!

Anyhow, here are a few images of the finished game board. The hills were fixed to the board with loads of PVA and then the whole thing was flocked with a couple of bags of woodland scenic’s turf – one bag of green blend and one earth blend (again, stuck down with a suitable quantity of PVA glue.

Game Board

One of the hill pieces

Difficult terrain on the hill tops

As can be seen from the last image I used some gravel to represent the rocky cliffs. That needed a lot of PVA, plus regular coats of PVA afterwards to make sure they were stuck fast. I ended up pouring small amounts of PVA over the stones over a couple of days to get them to stick properly. Also I sprayed a coat of watered-down PVA over all of the flock after a couple of hours just to bond it to the board a bit better.

Finally, and after everything had dried, I sprayed each of the boards with varnish (satin in this case) for an added layer of protection.

Polystyrene is fairly difficult to work on without a hot wire cutter, as well as being really messy. I don’t have a hot wire cutter (and yes, I did go out and try to buy one!) but I do have an old, cheap soldering iron. It’s one of those soldering irons that uses a metal loop between two points on the hand grip and an electrical current passes through the wire to generate the heat. By stripping a length of electrical cable to get at the copper wire and replacing the original soldering iron element with my new, really long one I had a makeshift wire cutter! What’s more, it actually worked (you can see it in the first image).

The rest was pretty much plain sailing and I happily carved out a hill:

Foot hills

Hill top

Hill on top of four of the boards

That’s about it for now, though there is still the problem of carving that hill in to four pieces, one for each section of the base. As you can see, we created a nicely sloping section to the hill and topped it with a much more steep inclined section – ideal for gun emplacements to hang out on!

MDF board after cutting at B&Q!

Once home I took to sizing them up. To have a truly modular board that we could have in any configuration I realised that each square would have to be just that – square. By measuring each board to find the smallest dimensions amongst them I decided that 600mm squares would be possible with a bit of planing. I’ll be honest, I’m no carpenter and I did expect this to all go horribly wrong leaving me with a load of scrap MDF. Luckily I remembered the electric planer that I bought a couple of years ago to do one door in the house. I know that one small and simple job is a really ridiculous reason to buy a new electrical tool but I was glad I’d done it now. Besides, can you imagine what a mess I might have made of the door if I’d used a manual plane?

Some careful measuring and planing left me with 8 600mm squares of MDF. Well, nearly. I’d say that they were within about 0.5mm. I considered that a great success and continued on…

Fixing them together was going to be the hard bit. The Games Workshop board comes with lots of clips to attach the bases neatly, but that was unlikely to be an option here. I had noticed one blogger (the link to which I have since lost) attached them using dowel rods and this seemed like a reasonable idea.

Template and some of the drilled holes in the boards

Unfortunately this requires very accurate drilling along every edge and again I thought this could be the undoing of the entire project. But after the success of the square-cutting I thought I’d give it a go anyway. Ever the sensible person I decided to create a template for cutting the holes to at least make it easier to get them in the same place on each board. I really didn’t fancy having to measure and mark every hole before drilling either.

After being careful to drill the pilot holes using the template on the same face of each board (to make sure the holes match as well as they can) I drilled 9mm holes to fit some 9mm dowelling pegs I had cut up. A quick test showed that, perhaps surprisingly, the boards did actually match up using the dowel pegs to keep them in position. Admittedly the joins were a little tight and sometimes needed a little ‘persuasion’ to push the boards close enough to prevent gaps, but after a few fits the holes seemed to loosen a little and it became easier to push them together. Another result for amateur carpentry!

Adding some colour to the boards

The final task of the day was to get a bit of colour on them. For the sake of simplicity we just sprayed them brown. I’m hopeful that the later flocking will mean the mottled colouration won’t be visible and it should also help hide the joins in the board.

Initially its destructive capabilities appeared limited, but that was before we discovered the ‘overdrive’ button.

The movie below documents our results…

[See post to watch QuickTime movie] ]]> http://www.monkeydispenser.com/2008/11/09/next-world-domination/feed/ 0 http://www.monkeydispenser.com/2008/06/18/oh-no-what-have-i-done/ http://www.monkeydispenser.com/2008/06/18/oh-no-what-have-i-done/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:13:20 +0000 Jason http://www.monkeydispenser.com/2008/06/18/oh-no-what-have-i-done/ Last weekend I discovered a slow puncture in the rear tyre of my beloved SV650S, probably down to the piece of metal sticking in it. Financially it couldn’t really have picked a worse time to happen, but that’s the way these things often go. After finally working out where to get a new tyre (this is the first time I’ve had to do anything like this with a bike) and deciding that the front could do with replacing too I decided it would just be easier to remove the wheels and take them in to avoid the extra fitting cost and having to wait for longer while the tyres were fitted.

Somehow that simple job has turned in to a refurbishment of the front forks. I don’t know what happened last night, but I just couldn’t seem to stop undoing things and taking them off. I just hope my Haynes manual is as good at telling me how to put it back together. Maybe I should have read that bit first.

So all I need now is a bike. Assuming the weather holds out for a few more weeks I’ll be heading up to Edinburgh to pick it up soon. After that the world is my oyster. Well, perhaps not since it wouldn’t go down too well if I spent all my time out on the bike. It’s tough being a modern husband…

That was a joke, by the way. I wouldn’t swap any of them for the bike, tempting as it may be some days