Projects for 2021 and completed projects from 2020

Back in January of last year I posted the following projects for 2020. Projects for 2020 are as follows: All are 6mm unless noted otherwise. 

Complete Late Roman/Byzantine army completed 

 Complete Sassanid army completed 

 Add cavalry to Achaemenid army completed 

 Finish Warbands not started 

 Make additional built up areas in progress 

 Make pine Forest not started 

 I have a dozen two foot square interlocking mats that have been painted a light brown to finish in progress 

 I have a bunch of 28mm Fantasy figures in various stages of painting to finish. Finished some armies, working on others 

 Add a few more 28mm science fiction building paper buildings. completed 

 In addition to the above I also completed a 28mm sci-fi alien battle group, sci-fi IFV's and tanks. I could have done quite a bit more, but spent the later part of the year doing things other than wargaming. 

This year I will be working on the items that were not completed. The 6mm warbands and the pine forest are the lowest priority at the moment. The 6mm built up areas, two foot square interlocking terrain mats, and the remaining 28mm fantasy have the higher priority.

Projects for 2020 and a review of projects for 2019

Back at the beginning of 2019 I posted my project plans for 2019.   These are listed in black with status in Red   All Projects are 6mm unless noted otherwise.

Finish Late Roman/ Byzantine army  Still to be done
Finish Sassanid Persian Army  Still to be done
Finish Warbands  Still to be done
Finish lace wars armies  Completed
Finish Napoleonic armies.  Completed
Purchase and paint modern engineering equipment after GHQ finishes releasing the vehicles for early this year.  Completed
Make 2mm towns and villages. (counted about 40 for one scenario)  Dropped plans for 2mm army
Make some more 6mm towns, villages, and farms.  Made some, more to do
Finish painting 2mm armies.  Replaced with 6mm Franco-Prussian and completed
Paint about a dozen 25mm sci-fi figures I dug out of storage.   (yes, they are actually 25mm figures from 35 years ago)  Completed
Make jungle.  Got some left over palm trees and bamboo to place on Litko hexes.  Completed
Make pine forest.   Bump chenille on Litko hexes.  Started

Items that were added and completed
purchased and painted some 1:285 Leopard 2 Revolutions
Finished painting some 28mm fantasy figures.
Finished the 28mm castle
Purchased and painted some 28mm science fiction figures
Printed and assembled a 28mm spaceship using World Works Games First Light, expansion, and other sets.
Printed and Assembled the 28mm Desert Village and Desert Fort sets from Wargames Vault.
Printed and assembled a 28mm Science Fiction town using World Works Games Mars Station set.
While most of the above were not reported on the blog, they can be seen in several of the blog posts.

Projects for 2020 are as follows:

All are 6mm unless noted otherwise.
Complete Late Roman/Byzantine army
Complete Sassanid army
Add cavalry to Achaemenid army
Finish Warbands
Make additional built up areas
Make pine Forest
I have a dozen two foot square interlocking mats that have been painted a light brown to finish
I have a bunch of 28mm Fantasy figures in various stages of painting to finish.
Add a few more 28mm science fiction buillding paper buildings.

Industrial Park

Finished assembling a set of industrial buildings and a factory from IliadaGameStudio    Most paper buildings are usually residential structures or churches.  Modern industrial buildings are rare.   I added a residential house from one of the other sets to the factory to make an office annex. 

The industrial set includes a page of pavement.   I printed that on paper and cut sections from it for parking areas and driveways.   Thanks to the texturing of the pavement the seams where the sections are joined on the modular sections are almost invisible.  I used white glue to adhere the pavement to the mat board and glue the buildings in place.  In a couple of places this caused a few stains that added  the effect of oil stains from vehicles.

In addition to the three round tanks, three rectangular buildings, and two Quonset huts the industrial set also includes nine 40 foot containers one of which is the red one at the center right.  There are two additional structures that can be added as desired on the building at the top right.

The buildings are on modular sections that can be arranged in various ways.

Trees, Trees, and More Trees (and rubber mats)

This past week I finally finished adding trees to all of the Litko hexes.  This was an on and off project as I found spare time.  There are about 2000 trees on the 300 hexes.   The 300 hexes would cover an area of about 8 square feet if placed in organized columns.   They have been placed in a slightly irregular pattern to conform to the roads and waterways on the two foot by two foot interlocking rubber mats.  

I got the mats from an Amazon dealer a while back.  They came in a large cardboard box which is great for storing and transporting them.   18 of the mats have waterways in addition to the roads.  The mats are available in different colors, but I got black ones due to the discounted price.   Only one side of the mats is smooth with the other side being ridged.   I had a cheap can of cast off brown paint that I got from Home Depot.   Colored paint is made by adding colors to a can of white base.   At times the person mixing the color will make a mistake, creating the wrong color for the customer and have to make another can of the correct color.   The mistakes are usually put aside in a group and sold at a discount,

I painted the entire surface of the smooth sides of the mats and let them dry.   Next I painted the waterways.  These were offset from the center of each edge by about 4 inches, lining up with the middle of one of the interlocking tabs.  Six of the mats have branching waterways, six have curves that exit at different points, two go straight across from one side to the opposite. two shift from the left to right as they cross (one is at the bottom left), while the last two shift from right to left.  The rest of the mats do not have waterways. 

The roads were taped off with 3/4 inch (20mm) painters tape and are centered on the edge of the mats.  The road pattern varies from mat to mat and tends to conform to the waterways.   White glue was spread on the mats using a one inch paint brush avoiding the waterways.   Mixed green ground foam from Woodland Scenics was sprinkled on the glue, and the excess shaken off to be collected for the next mat.  The mats are another intermittent project that I work on as time permits.  There are nine left to finish.

T



Trees

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.” » Chinese Proverb

One of my projects for this year is rebasing the trees.   I had been using irregular shaped foam core board, but storing and transporting them resulted in the trees being squished or falling out.  So in order to fix this I bought 300 of the Litko 50mm hexes.  These were cheaper than the 2 inch/50mm ovals or circles.  

114 hexes completed.

A while back I had purchased 1600 trees from a Chinese Ebay dealer.  These are available in various sizes and are steeply discounted if you buy the 400 piece lots.  the are also available in dark green, medium green, and light green.   I chose dark green.  30mm, 35mm and 38mm tall trees were purchased. 

They can be found by searching for 400pc trees on Ebay.   In addition to the hexes and trees,  Woodland Scenics Blended Green ground foam was used for the hexes

Tools and equipment for the project were 1/16 and 5/64 drill bits (slightly smaller than 2mm), a sharp tool to enlarge the holes if need be,  an old #2 or #3 paint brush, needle nose pliers ,a 6x8 two inch deep container for the ground foam. and white glue.  Most of the tree trunks will fit in a 5/64 hole while about 10 to 20% will fit in the smaller 1/16 hole.   About 1 to 2% are too large for a 5/64 hole. 

The hexes were drilled in stacks of 10 in order to avoid drilling through the bottom of the stack.   six or seven holes were drilled in each stack.   A drop of glue was placed on each hole and the trees were inserted.   Those that fit too loosely in the 5/64 holes were inserted in the hexes with 1/16 holes.   Some needed a bit of persuasion to fit in the holes requiring the use of the needle nose pliers to grasp the trunk and push them in.  For those that were too large the holes were enlarged and then the trees were placed in the holes.   The trunks are twisted wire and the white glue forms a secure bond between the wooden hexes and wire trunks.

After the glue holding the trees had dried, I used the brush to spread a coating of white glue on the top of the hexes.  The bases were then dipped in a thn layer of ground foam in the 6x8 container and the excess was tapped off.  this was done to avoid getting the ground foam in the branches.

It takes about 3 hours to drill the hexes, insert trees, and glue the ground cover for 120 hexes.   I have finished about 240 hexes.   Additional trees have been ordered and some of the finished hexes will have one or two trees added to them.

Home Made Rivers and Roads

After reading about making roads with caulk, I decided that I would try doing so myself.   And if roads could be made then so could streams and rivers.   I have some commercial latex roads that I bought a while back and while they are good none of the commercial rivers were what I wanted.   Usually they were too wide and too regular in width.   The caulk that I used is made by DAP and is available in several different colors.   I decided to try the lighter brown TAN color.

I taped some clear plastic wrap to the top of the patio table and using a caulking gun squeezed out a single bead for streams and multiple beads for roads and rivers.   I had a couple of hard plastic parts bin dividers that I used to smooth out the roads and streams.  Fortunately they had a tab that could be removed from one edge making a 2cm (3/4 inch) wide opening which was just the right width for roads.  After letting them dry in the sun for a few hours I turned them over and let the other side dry for a few hours.   The following three pictures show several stream sections drying.

After the streams had dried I first painted them with GHQ field grau and then immediately went over them with GHQ sea blue.  This gave them a greenish blue color that varied instead of being the same along the length of each section.  The final photo shows two unpainted road sections and a couple of stream sections.  The bridge is from the PaperTerrain 6mm stone bridge set.   They have two different bridge sets and they are available in a couple of different colors.  One set is sectional lengths that can be used to create bridges of different lengths and the other has arched  bridges in three different lengths and a pontoon bridge.  After painting I used some scissors to trim the ends and to cut the ones with multiple bends into shorter sections.

We built this city

Over the past couple of months I have been assembling several sets of the micro scale Paperterrain buildings.The first picture is the Mediterranean village set with the Monastery set in the background.  The second one has parts of the European Town and Village sets.  I still have quite a few European buildings to assemble.  The third one is the North Russian village set and the final one is the North African set.    These are on modular sections and can be re-arranged in several different ways or each section can be used on its own.  The buildings can also be removed to expose the ruined interior.

Each set takes several hours to cut and assemble.   After determining how I wanted the building arranged, I glued some paper roads in place on some artist matt board (a thick paper material than can be purchased in different colors for a few dollars) for the Mediterranean and European sets.  Next, I glued the ruins and walls in place, glued Woodland Scenics ground foam for the grass and poked holes for the trees.  A brown marker was used to make the roads for the Russian and North African villages.

Paperterrain make quite a few different sets in scales from 6mm to 28mm.   The website is http://www.paperterrain.com/

The trees are from Everest Models, a dealer on EBAY.  They are available in various sizes and can be purchased in small or large lots for an inexpensive amount.   I'll have some photos in the next post of them being used to create a forested area for a re-fight of the 30 Years Wars battle of Breitenfeld.