A Road Less Traveled

I got some very good feedback from my previous post where I lamented the failure of my foamcore hex rivers. Messrs. Paul and Pahoota suggested using 1 mm thick styrene plastic as a base. The thought was that the styrene wouldn't warp when I put the caulk down. I have sheets of styrene plastic in the form of For Sale signs. They have gone up a bit in price at Walmart, but $2.75 is still a steal for a fairly large sign. The guy behind the paint counter must be wondering what I am constantly selling.

Before I plunge into the river waters again, I thought I'd test it out by making roads. Here is the result:

The short section of road on the far left is one of my road hexes that goes with my forest hexes. The cross road section and the straight section of road are the test pieces. They are caulked, painted, and flocked, but I have not applied a wash on them yet.

Verdict: no warping, at least so far. One thing I did not do was add a layer of card stock on top of the plastic base. I applied the caulk directly to the plastic. I also applied the flocking that is on either side of the roads to the plastic. The reason why I added the thin card stock on my forest hexes was that I thought I needed a good substrate to hold paint and other things down. I get the feeling that the card stock was responsible for my multi-hex warping, so I might make another multi-hex but without the paper layer. I'm sure that caulk must shrink when it dries, but it could be that paper does more. It does not fully explain why the foamcore warped, but my next step is to start working on the rivers.

Hex-based River Project: Fail!

*Sigh*

Last night, I cleaned off a small table that I plan to play some small mircoarmor games to compare various modern rule sets. I had mentioned my plans to do this some time ago. Anyway, I laid down the finished river hexes to figure out how I wanted the river to go for these games. When I did, they looked awful in terms of how warped they were! I guess carpet is far more forgiving; but on a hard, flat surface, they really looked bad. It looks like some major geological faulting occurred on the battlefield! More importantly, they would be impractical. Even if I taped them down, they would rock around. They also didn't fit well together because of the warping.

I couldn't bear to throw them in the trash. Its not like it cost much to make them: $4 for two sheets of foamcore, and about $3 for the tube of latex caulk. It was the time I put into them and my little mini-hex forests; that is pretty much all I've worked on for the last several months. My hobby time is limited to an hour or two at night, and that's only if I don't have grading to do, or am just too tired to do anything. So, I stuck them in a plastic bag and found a spot for them on a shelf.

I guess plan B is to use the caulk directly. No mounting them on anything. You'd have to give me a good argument to do so, or guarantee on pain of death that the material you suggest won't warp.  I don't want any warping. Just say "NO!" to warping.

Like it or not, the saga of river building continues....

Another Year Older....

...but I'm not sure how much wiser!

Update

I have not done much since the last post. Last week, I had spring break. I spent the early part of the week visiting an old college friend who lives in Atlanta. His wife passed away a few months ago from cancer. It wasn't meant to be a "fun" visit but it turned out well. Basically he talked, I listened. This isn't meant to be a boast, but as another friend said, "truly listening to people is what you do best." 

The remainder of my vacation was taken up with my daughter's tennis tournament. I had planned on finishing the revisions on a paper to be published, but that didn't happen.

Since I've been back, I've been swamped with work, mostly grading and non-scholarly things. Much of the little free time has been spent cleaning the work area. I started to make a few more river hexes even though I didn't plan to make more. One of them is going to have a dock along the river, and maybe a little shack or hut on the bank. The other, I was going to make specifically for a bridge, but that is still up in the air on that. I'd prefer to be able to stick bridges anywhere along my river. I also toyed with the idea of taking the Mediterranean villa I bought from GameCraft Miniatures and set it high up on the side of the river. The hexes are not big enough to accommodate it. I'd have add an extension to the hex, and I think that would look funny. I might still do it, who knows?

I bought some stuff from Shapeways...sorry, no pictures.  I got some more various aircraft, including a 1/300 twin-engine Cessna (not cheap!) and some Pakistani JF-17 Thunder multirole fighters in 1/285. 1/300 and 1/600. The 1/285 looks a little more detailed than the 1/300...no surprise there, but the 1/600 looks awfully small even for that scale. I'll have to compare it to both Oddzial Osmy and Tumbling Dice, but it looks smaller than even Oddzial Osmy's planes. 

 In addition to the airplanes, I bought some 1/96 scale ship-building accessories. This included a 25mm gun and some bridge binoculars. Don't ask me how I got this in my head, but my plan is to build a 1/00 (15mm) small, modern patrol craft. It can be used for AK-47 games. 1/96 is a little big, but don't think it will be too obvious. The plan is to try to sell it. 

Last but not least, more rules! I'm not going into them in detail, but I got Brigade Commander from Five-Core Rules. Another set to be potentially used for modern armor combat. The biggie is that I splurged and got General Quarters III. I can't deny it, I've got naval fever! Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Making Rivers for 6mm, Part 3

I'm SLOWLY getting there on my rivers. Here is a small stretch:

Sorry about the crazy background. I took the picture on a chair because the rest of my work area is a major mess! That is also the reason why they are not fitting together that well. The river itself is done, or at least as good as its going to get. I am now working on the banks. I am not going to go all crazy here on this project. I'm still not sure that I will end up using them, but I've come this far, so I am going to complete them. I keep thinking about just laying down some caulk without any sort of base and be done with it. Currently, I am taking a forced break in order to attempt to clean up the messy workbench.

A few other thoughts as I do some housecleaning:
1. The siren song of naval wargaming once more is calling me. Back in the late 70s and into the 80s, I was a big naval wargamer. My friends and I used various rules, even a homemade one based on Avalon Hill's Midway, but we settled on Fletcher Pratt rules.

Some aspects IMHO were a little clunky, like how torpedoes worked (they almost never hit anything), but they seemed to have what we wanted. Anyway, lately, I've been wanting to go back to naval gaming. There is a naval gaming Facebook group that I joined, and that might be the culprit. I am thinking about pre-dreadnought era, but can't decide. What's holding me back, among many other things, is do I want to build my own or just buy them. One of these days, I will pull out and photograph my scratch-built fleets that I built in the early 80s.

2. Completing my own modern rules. I've been putting together little bits and pieces of it for some time now. It is a mash up of several published rules that I like. I take the best parts and put them together. I'll use them for solo purposes. I've noticed there seems to be a lot of game design posts on various blogs, and a lot of folks are coming up with their own rules. I figure, it they can do it, so can I.

3. Having another epic fantasy battle. Not much to comment on, except I am in the mood for one. It will give me an excuse to paint more of the pile. I still have to finish those rangers, and I have a big pile of Copplestone barbarians that I want to dig into and paint up.

OK, I think that is enough introspective cogitating for one night.

Multihex Complete: the Twilight Zone Post

I thought I had posted the post just before this one. I even made a brief comment on January 23rd concerning it. You probably had no idea what I was referring to. So, I put it up just now, even though it was supposed to be up a month ago. I thought instead of just adding to it, I would make an update. The current polar vortex has reached down to NE TN and SW VA. Schools have been closed for a week including mine. So, I've had some time to work on things.

So, here is the multihex completed:

It is surrounded the smaller forest hexes and each road has a road hex added to its end.

I am not happy with it. It warped, particularly at the side were you can see the dark line where it connects with one of the road hexes. Also, I am having a hard time seeing figures being able to sit in the forest. There is only supposed to be no more than one figure in a hex at a time, but I am not sure they can accommodate even that.

Here are some close ups:

The small grey structure on the left side of the road is supposed to be a roadside shrine.

The verdict is that I won't be making any more of these multihexes unless I can think of some way of avoiding the warping.

More Light/medium Forest

While waiting for the banks to dry on my river hexes and deciding what to use to paint them, I made some road hexes to go through the forests. They look pretty boring:

So I thought, why not make a large, single multihex and put a road through that? "Multihex," does that make sense? As you are reading this, each time you see the word "multihex," you need to say it out loud the way Leeloo probably would.

What I mean by multihex is, make single larger hex made up of or the same dimensions as a cluster of the smaller hexes. I punched out seven hexes out of the thin styrene plastic signs; one central hex and six to go around it. I glued them together very carefully with modeler's glue:

By carefully, I mean lining up the edges as precisely as I could. The result looked like this when glued together:

You could be saying, "why not print out a paper template and use that to cut out the multihex?" I did consider that, but I figured that if my cutting was the slightest bit off, the result would be a poor alignment with other hexes. I experienced something like that when I used a template to make my own hex mat.  Very slight errors in hex alignment were greatly magnified to the point where I consider the mat unusable.

Once hexes dried, I took this and used it as the template to cut out the second layer of plastic:

I could have punched out more single hexes and glued them on top of my first layer, but I figured that a single sheet would add more stability. As careful as I was, it was still tough lining the two sheets up.

Here is what it looks like with some of the small, 2" hexes around it as well as two road hexes:

And now for a ComicLife test run:

Yeah, its stupid, makes no sense and no Roy Lichtenstein work of art, but I wanted to see how ComicLife works. I installed it a zillion years ago and never got around to using it.  Lesson 1: make sure the scene is properly aligned and characters are more or less in the middle of the box.