"Using high grit sandpaper for roads and Highways?" Topic

I just was wondering if any one has ever done this, I was thinking with extra glue and paint it shouldn't be a problem and should make into a very nice road or highway and is not that costly for a larger area

Yes, I have seen it in various AARs. Seems to work well.

I planned to do it for modern streets for my superhero games but since I picked up the Mean Streets buildings which come with matching streets, I didn't need to.

Ive used it as bases for 'streets' before. Works nicely with a light drybrush of grey.

works well and if you paint it its less like sandpaper and more like a road.

Use 'wet and dry' paper. It is already grey!

I figured it would be easier to do for a large city terrain board, but I want it to look good as well

Don't push your figures / vehicles along it tho……….they grow shorter!

Railway Modellers have been using 'wet and dry' paper for roads for ages.

ive done it love it works great.

I've seen it done since the 1970s.

6mm.wargaming.info/page32.shtml is a tutorial for 6mm but is obviously viable with a change in dimensions for 15mm…

Mserafin,
I'm one of em…
Man I'm old…

Looks good. I usually paint it and always shoot a coat of acrylic spray sealant on it. That mitigates the odds that dice, overlapping terrain pieces, and the errant face down figure will get marred up.

I'd also make sure I used WORN sandpaper, 320grit or so.

I thought about it, but was too worried about what it would do to my tank treads. Ended up stripping and texturing foam core instead.

I'd recommend "sealing" the sandpaper with a coat of Modge-Podge (or similar) after you've painted it. That will help smooth out the grain, so will cause wear less on your miniatures and also help it last longer.

I use it alot but I tend to paint it and run a sealer over it to take some of the edge off.

Makes great desert areas too.
Cleaner and neater than individually gluing down each particle :)

I had thought about doing this using sanding belts, but I'm worried about what damage it might do to my minis. Now I'm kicking around the idea of cutting out strips of poster board and spraying them with Tool-Dip for a nice asphalty look.

A month or two ago, I was looking to source larger sizes of sandpaper. I failed. I must admit that I didn't look very hard. My father had piles of 2 ft squares he bought in the late 70's or early 80's. It was only a year or two ago that I exhausted all of these. What dimensions of sandpaper can one buy in the US today?

Dear Religon

Two feet square!!! Wow I've never seen it that large! I suspect nowadays when everything is done by mechanical tools you'd hae to go to a place that supplies Indistrial sandpaper for large sanding machines.

Not to be heretical but I don't like sandpaper for roads. If you look at real dirt and unimproved roads, even in a desert, the sand doesn't look "sandy" at all. The texture, even when you get to fine sandpaper is still too coarse for real life viewed at 6 ft, let alone 200 ft, which is the scale distance from your eye to the road surface when standing over the table top. I use simply spackling putty and smooth it out, and if I want some pitting I prick it with a nail now and then. Far more likely to be found is ruts from wagon wheels, which I put on with an old spare gun carriage I run up and down the starting to dry plaster.

My father ran a machine shop with a couple hundred employees. The sandpaper he had in his personal shop was hand-cut. He had sources for all sorts of odd, industrial things. His company shop made some unique machinery. The large squares may have come from 4-ft wide shag rolls.

Thanks lots of good advice thank you all for your input.

Slightly off topic, but I found that roofing shingles work well. A coat of black paint and some quick drybrushing and they look like asphalt.

Here's two other road options:
link