"Kabul River terrain board build - PART I" Topic

Here's a link to a blog entry I just put up on the first several steps of building a 6'x2' terrain board for my Second Afghan War 1879 Battle of Charasiab terrain lay-out.

Watch me try to recreate a stretch of the Kabul River in the Northern Logar Valley as seen winding its way down the center of this Google Earth pic…

…by going from this…

…to this:

If interested, please click here to visit and see more:

link

I think it is looking good.

Matthew

WOW!!!! Great

Well done! Those appear to very sharp knives. Were they easy to cut the foam? I used a bread knife and hot wire cutter. It was still very messy.

I can appreciate the amount of work that is required for your layout. I built a terrain piece for the Battle of Queenston Heights using foam and a canvas drops sheets.

I look forward to your next stages. BTW good report and photos, thanks.

Can't wait to see the next step, oh guru of questionable sanity…

though I'm wondering how your table would look with my 15mm troops on it.

perhaps one day when I am employed again…

Thanks for the positive comments, guys!

@Ironuke596: yes they are sharp knives. In my experiance a sharp kitchen knife is the best tool for cutting foam, if the blade is long enough to make it all the way through. I've also used hot-wire cutters and they can do a good job too, but in my experience they don't survive for very long. There are more expensive power-tools out there, used to cut foam insulation sheets on constructon sites and also to carve foam for various creative purposes, but they usually cost a couple hundred dollars. In the long term, if you know you'll be cutting a ton of terrain out of foam, it might be worth it to buy one, but I haven't yet.

Regarding mess: the higher the quality/density of the foam, the less messy it is to cut. Still I always use the vacuum cleaner at some point -- something I left out of that blog post! One exceptioin to the "higher quality foam = less messy" rules is sanding -- if you have to sand, no matter what kind of foam it is, it will be VERY MESSY. The good news is pretty much any vacuum will manage a thorough clean-up, at least in my experience.

EDIT: @Lion in the Stars: Didn't I pose a handful of my old Mike's Models 15mm Colonials atop one of my rocky wood-chip hills and the post the pics for you a while back?! I think your 15s would look pretty awesome! I'm building this lay-out at 1" = 50 yards, so the entire 12'x6' table is about 4 miles wide by 2 miles deep, which just about perfectly covers the space over which the battle of Charasiab was actually fought. Your 15s would be closer in figure scale size to my ground scale than my 28s are. I don't plan to downsize my armies but if you bring yours over after I'm done I'll be happy to host them!