"Create your own Afghan valley in miniature" Topic

I recently stumbled across this fabulous website and found it very inspiring. Not sure whether it has featured on TMP before but perhaps of possible interest to some. This is an amazing way to create in miniature an Afghan valley, or, indeed, a Scottish highland valley.

link

Having been earlier captivated by fellow-TMPer Der Alte Fritz's revelation that he has a 12-foot wargame table, I want to recreate a huge Afghan valley for a Soviet-Afghan bridge clash on a similar size board. This website and information will make that happen the sooner. Really excited by this discovery.

Much respect to Allens Micro Armor Blog.

Very nice !

Lovely

<stupid>

I followed the link but can't see where it says how to make the mountains

</stupid>

Am I missing something?

link

I apologise for my stupidity. Self-taught.

Click on the 'Afghanistan' tag at the bottom of the blog page and then follow the 'Afghan Mountain Boards' posts – there are three.
(Sorry for butting in Captain D!)

Really nice boards and setup thanks for sharing

Impressive work. It's incredible how much you can get on a game table at that scale, and his modular board pieces are very well thought out. If you dig through the site there's a picture of boards he built as a teenager in the 1980s so we're benefiting from decades of practical experience when we mine his work for ideas.

For hills and mountains it looks like he follows a (what I think of as) newer model railroading technique. Rather than building up layers of polystyrene and carving down into it, he creates a structural skeleton of a central spine plus crosspiece spines (ribs?). Then the voids in between are stuffed with balled up newspaper crossed with masking tape to hold them in place. The top is covered with wetted plaster cloth that then hardens into the outer shell of the mountain. Atop that goes ground cover, flock etc.

My only complaint as a lurker on this site is that I wish there was more narrative about his building techniques. Not so much for the boards, hills, mountains, and trees which seem to use well documented model railroad techniques. But for the buildings.

Clicking further on the site I see he is the owner of Gamecraft Minatures. Maybe that's where the buildings come from.

Anyway Captain DEwell, thanks very much for the post.

Whoa. That's truly incredible…model railroad-level work on a gaming table. I'd love to have one like that!!

Very talented guy. Thanks for posting!

Cheers,
Aaron

That modeling technique is literally as old as the hills. My dad used a similar in the 1950s when he built his layout except he used window screen and troweled on plaster. Using a cardboard strip frame work, newspaper filler, and plaster soaked paper towels or plaster cloth has been around for at least 20 years if not longer. The benefit of this technique is once completed, you can pull out the newspaper from the back/underneath and all that is left is a hard shell that is light and fairly easily handled. It can't, however take a lot a punishment or banging around so his mounting them on a board is a good way to protect them.

The modeler has done a great job. And I'm glad the original poster referred us to his site.

Jim

I thought Allen had a tutorial on building this on his blog. Maybe I saw it on GHQ's forums. He is really one of the best model builders around.

Have you seen the ruined city center he is working on? Unbelievable!

Beautiful, but my first thought was "Where could I store something like that?"

Pink or blue foam over 1/2" MDF is now my favorite way to build modules such as this.

The plaster/hydracoal over newspaper/carboard strips is a classic, and beautiful, but for modules that are stored and moved around, high quality foam beats it.

Buck up and buy the $25 USD Woodland Scenics hot foam cutter, or be cheap and use hack saw blades and sandpaper. Either way makes museum quality terrian.

While beautifully done, I wouldn't consider using this technique for gaming – especially traveling scenery. Even on the boards, it will be way too fragile. I'm both a gamer and a model railroader – and familiar with every technique mentioned here.

However, I love seeing it since I'm in the early planning stage of creating something similar and the way he included the roads gives me some ideas to improve what I'm considering (inspired originally by something on Major General Tremorden Reddering's site). I do like the modular nature of what was built and plan something similar.

I remember way back in the mid-80's when I carved quite large junks of foam into contoured hills and mountains and just blew people away with such an idea. Of course, back then, loads of people relied on books under blankets for terrain, lichen was common, and we were just discovering plastic cake decorating evergreens. To see really nice terrain was very much an exception in those days.

I am now moving onto a flexible resin based technique that I'm hoping will allow me to create flexible rivers that can bend with terrain to allow a river that can truly travel downhill – and not always the same hill. Too soon to say if it will work.

But, again, beautiful work and a great source of inspiration. So, thanks for posting.