"Suggest a material for a topo style map?" Topic

I have a map of Gettysburg and want to do a board with accurate contours. I am toying with each contour being 20'. I need a suggestion for a material to build the layers out of. It would need to be pretty thin – no more than 1/8" – but still workable. The board will be small at 1cm=100 yards but even so I'll need a fair bit of whatever I choose.

What would you use?

Sounds like a pretty cool project. I'd use matboard, as sold for picture framing, and a mat cutter.

Nice idea about the mat board, but also consider 1/2" 'hard' styrofoam sold in railroad shops for layouts. Would cut easily and paint/flock well. Thicker than you asked for, but might look better depending on the scale of the miniatures.

Dan

Thin cork rolls, intended for DIY bulletin boards? These are readily available at my office supply store.

link

You can also get foam sheets at typical craft stores.

I'd also second the cork sheets. You can 'economise' a bit by cutting out the centre of some layers and supporting the hollows with layers of card cut smaller than the hole – the cut out centres then become smaller, higher layers of the map.

Cork cuts well with a reasonably sharp hobby knife, glues with PVA, paints OK, is a bit lighter than card, and it holds stick-in terrain like trees if you pre-drill holes slightly undersized.

Cork tiles or polystyrene ceiling tiles.

Artists mounting board or cork tiles as above. Cork tiles can be pinned fairly easily.

If planning on glueing either, they'll need to be weighted down.

I made topo hills for various Peninsular War battles out of normal corrugated card, but it is a bit coarse really.

Actually, I would look at carpet tiles, with the right colour and a tight weave they would nopt need much doing to them either.

If you intend to leave the hills as contour lines, then cork tiles might be good. If you want to smooth out the contours, e.g. with some form of 'filler', then (if memory serves me well – it was a LONG time ago) at school geography class we used a kind of rolled polystyrene (which was intended as a form of wall insulation) which was like a ceiling tile, but on wide rolls. It was about 1/4" thick, I guess. After the sheets were layered and dry, the contours were 'painted' over with a layer of plaster-of-Paris.

However, I'm not sure where you might get the rolls these days – anyone?

If you reside in the northern tier of the US, I'd suggest looking at Home Depot or Lowes for thin-sheet pink foam insulation. They offer it in semi-flexible batts about 3/8" thick as a wind-blocking material. It would be very easy to cut cleanly, and the resulting boards would be very light.

Thanks for all the suggestions. One reason for my thickness requirement is that these pieces will be somewhat small. At this scale Little Round Top is about 2" in diameter. I'll be using it with 6mm figures.

Even on the more gently rolling areas you're talking about elevation changes every couple inches so even a 1/8" thickness will be too much.

I'm going to experiment with matt board as a first try. My current thinking is not to smooth it out so the elevations "show" better…

Another possible option is vinyl floor tiles, east to cut, you can use scissors rather than a knife.

And to follow up on FreddBloggs comment, if you get the tiles with the adhesive backing then it will assist in your assembly by removing a rather messy step of gluing the contours to each other.

Jim

As a (possible) closing aside:

Cutting/assembling multiple layers to build topography is the poorer choice: carving/routing out of a single block of material is better.

Ah yes, my problem is i couldn't carve a D6 with a ruler and a 5 side head start…so slow and tedious for me I'm afraid…