"My 6mm Palm Tree Project" Topic

I recently was gifted with about 30 commercially produced palm trees from a good friend. Overall these are great and better than I could produce from scratch.

The main issue for me with these in 6mm scale was that the plastic trunks are too thick. I decided to modify them by using picture hanging wire to replace the main part of the trunk.

I have two types of the wire and decided on one of them for the first 6 and the other type for the other 2. I kept the fronds and the top part of the trunk.

I drilled a hole in the bottom portion of the soft plastic top trunk and inserted and glued the wire in place. I then primed the new trunks and fronds separately. I painted the trunks an appropriate brown color and the fronds a lighter, slightly grayer green color.

Not totally happy with the trunks, I decided to wrap all 8 in a small piece of masking tape and the wire strands did not look quite right to me.

I will add these and more palm trees to an oasis that will be a future terrain project as will as in my village.

Here are a few pictures showing the progression from the original tree to the 8 completed trees. I have a Panzer IV from GHQ for scale.

Nicely done. Are you going to add any texturing to the trunks?

Jim

I would have just sanded down the originals to shrink them a bit and then done a light wash to highlight the contours.

Thanks very much, ColCampbell!

I am not sure how to add texture to the trunks and make them look better. I am considering an alternative to the masking tape to disguise the wire. This project is a bit of an experiment and I will try to make some improvements on the next batch.

Hi Tgerritsen!

I am not sure that sanding the trunks is a viable alternative for these. The trunks are about twice the thickness that I am looking for. I am thinking that by the time the sanding is done, the trunks would be much smoother anyway. The plastic on the trees is soft plastic. Who knows, I might try sanding one trunk to see how it goes.

I actually like the wound wire best. The trunks look the right thickness, the height is variable and customizable (trees should come in a lot of heights).

To reduce the texture somewhat without using tape, maybe try coating them with something, to fill in the channels somewhat…? I would try white glue first, since it's cheap and easy to work with. You just need a liquid that shrinks some as it dries.

Visually, you can get away with reducing the frond tops quite a bit – and then you can get more trees out of the fronds available. It takes fewer fronds to look "right" at a glance than it does to be scale accurate.

I would also suggest making the palm trees a little bit shorter. Miniature trees are weird – if they're the correct scale height, they make the battlefield look toy-like and skirmishy; if they are just "enough taller" than the miniatures, the battlefield looks bigger. All of my trees are underscale for the miniatures I'm using. (Buildings too.)

I've tried making wound-wire palm trees myself (and also using braided "picture wire"), and was also ambivalent about the results. The parts I found least satisfying were:

• The sheer amount of work. I want hundreds of the little things, but scratch-building makes each one a bunch of work.
  
• I'm unhappy with everything I've sourced for fronds except the plastic ones from model palm trees…. which are all oversized for 6mm gaming.<sigh>

I've been very happy with the commercial plastic palm trees for 15mm gaming, and I think they'll also work find down to about 10mm/12mm, but nobody I know mass produces plastic palm trees that look the right size for 6mm gaming.

Thanks very much, Yellow Admiral! I am actually considering using a filler of some sort on the trunks.

You are right about tree height and scale. I read that a date palm can grow as high as 100 feet which would be around 4 inches in my 6 mm scale. If you actually did that, the tree would dwarf anything else around it and just not look right.

I had a similar palm tree problem. IIRC I wrapped the trunks in thin gauze and sealed with thinned white glue.

Pete have you ever tried the GHQ method? As sold in the GHQ terrain kit for trees?

It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I do batches of 20 trees in about 15 minutes or so (not including clean-up … takes a few minutes to wash the hands when I'm done).

All it takes is some bump-chenille, some white glue, a candle (birthday cake candle will do), and a metal plate with a hole -- I use an angle-joint from the hardware store because it stands up hands-free on the table, and it has more than one usable hole so my production pace is higher. Oh, and a couple different colors of paint.

For those who don't know, chenille is like pipe-cleaners except more "floofey". It is for decoration, not for cleaning nasty stuff. Bump chenille is chenille that goes from thick to thin and back again.

Here is some brown bump chenille from a hobby retailer's website. I prefer green, but brown might do just as well.

You cut the chenille in the thickest and thinnest parts of the "bump". The thin end will be the trunk, the thick will be the top of the palm tree.

Cut a bunch of 'em. I do 20 at a time.

Put one through the hole in the metal plate about half to 2/3rds through. Pass the thin end over a lit candle to melt the nylon bristles to the wire stem. This will be the trunk of your palm tree. It's very easy to do. Just don't light it on fire!

Then push some more of the bushy part through the hole. Blob some white glue all around on it. Pull it back through the hole (from the bushy side) so you flatten all that gooey bushy part against the wire stem. This will be the dead fronds hanging down around the trunk.

Now blob some glue on the remaining still-fluffy bushy part, and pinch the remaining nylon hairs into several "palm-fronds". Let the glue dry, and apply a couple greens, tans, and a wash of dark brown. If you do a batch of about 20, your first one will be just about dry enough to paint when your last one is formed. Or at least that's how it works for me.

Oh, and the total cost is like maybe $4 USD for 120-160 trees.

Your palmage may vary…

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Thanks very much for the tutorial on the palm trees, Mk 1!

I have tried the GHQ method before and actually have a few palm trees that are done. I haven't quite got the hang of it so to speak, especially with the fronds. I have found a little watered down white glue is best for these but I was still not totally wowed by the results I got. I might post a few pictures of mine here to see what others might think.

Yours do look good. I may give it another go one of these days but may do some more experimentation with the commercial ones as well.

So much to do…not always as much time as I would like.

I've never seen (or thought of) the bump chenille technique. I'm going to try that, and see if I can make it work. It looks promising.

I also didn't know there were any useful resources on the GHQ web site, so I guess I have to go look around. I've never looked farther than the photos of painted ships and tanks that make me feel incompetent and inadequate.

- Ix