North Africa Wargaming Table Project Part 4: All's Well That Ends Well

In the end, I spent a couple of weeks trying to destroy the table while John made some absolutely amazing buildings to finish it.  I'll let him tell you all about those and how he cast the windows and doors and other architectural accoutrements.  The results, well, you be the judge...

I think we both learned a lot from the project.  Our next project will be even cooler, and hopefully fraught with less peril.  Where do you think should we go next time?  Tunisia?  Sicily?  Italy? Normandy?  Russia?  Germany?

Comments and critiques welcome.

We couldn't help ourselves.  The morning after Mike and Tiff Brittany got married, John and I dragged out the table and played a game.  It was awesome.

I love this table.

Some final thoughts for future projects:

Adhering foam to wood=wood glue.

Adhering foam to foam=tacky glue.

The plaster mix is very brittle and chips too easily for use on table panels that are meant to be transported.  The chips are very easy to fix, but a bit of an annoyance.  I think scoring the entire surface of the foam with a wire brush as mentioned in the first post would help.  I also think that adding silicon to the plaster mix, a-la incomparable wargame terrain guru Steve the Kamloopian, will give the plaster some flex and more durability.

Check your silicone caulk for the expiration date.  All that keeps this table from standing among the best examples of wargaming terrain out there are the oil stains that will forever seep through the plaster from the botched caulking job I did.

Protect your foam from Heat Fun.  'Nuff said.


I cannot wait to unveil this table to the group!  Tune in next time for the a report on our first game played on this board.

Game well, my Friends.

North Africa Wargaming Table Project Part 3: Heat Fun, or, Keep Out of Reach of Children

It was all so magical at the beginning.

In a single day John and I had transformed four panels of wood and pink foam into a very high-quality 1941-1942 Libyan port for North Africa wargame scenarios.  When we parted ways that evening we were both riding high on the knowledge that we were Gods of Wargaming Terrain.  Then I started tinkering with things, and before too long I had a Magicians Apprentice kind of thing going on where my "improvements" to the table started to get away from me.

Then things got worse, much worse, but not right away.  In fact for a while things were going pretty dang well.

I came home from work to find my order of EZ Water Heat and Pour on the front porch, so I headed inside to finish up the waterfront.

I built a containment dam, painted up a sewer pipe, and heavily stippled/sprinkled a bunch of pigment (dark brown, green, and yellow) on top of the existing EZ Water to look like sewage discharge.  Prior to that, though, I had given all the pilings a liberal wash of heavily thinned oil paint.  This process had left a few "pools" of thinned black pigment to dry around the bases of several of the pilings.  I decided to leave them there and see what the second layer of EZ Water would do when it hit these "oil slicks."


Here you can see the sewer discharge dry pigment on top of the first water effect pour.  You can also see the containment dam, which is a Home Depot yardstick wrapped in aluminum foil.

Having recovered emotionally from my earlier caulking disaster, I felt pretty confident about this pour.  And I was right.  When I poured the molten resin into the harbor, some of the pigments glopped together to form solid chunks of skunge suspended in the resin.  Other chunks rose to the top where I used a toothpick to spread them out to create the effect of murk flowing along with the tide.

The oil effects left over from staining the pilings worked perfectly.  Well beyond my expectations.  This will be a go-to move for me in the future.

The pour did not quite cover the tire in the center.  I think we need a third pour, but I will wait until John sees it, assuming the table is still intact when he finally sees what I have been doing to it.  You can see the suspended sewage and murk pretty well in this shot.

Here is the sewer pipe with the many layers of suspended grossness in the water.  It's so awesome!

One of the keys to producing a nice even water pour was my new heat gun (AKA Heat Fun!)

I had the pour pan in one hand and Heat Fun in the other, and was able to melt bubbles quickly to produce a smooth water surface and even some wave swells.  In another instance of accidental brilliance, I was "fixing" a mass of boiling bubbles caused by pouring molten resin over acrylic gloss coat when I realized that the bubbles were perfect to represent the boiling surf where the beach meets the water.  I was able to stop Heat Fun before I obliterated the surf foam completely, but not before I had reduced the number of bubbles significantly.  Still, it looks OK, as you can see below.

I will definitely use the hot resin over acrylic effect for foamy surf in the future.  Might even see what happens with tinted acrylics.

OK, I know you've been waiting patiently for the other shoe to drop, so...

-THUNK-

Here we go...

Heat Fun is really good at its job.  It can crank-out a continuous blast of 1350-degree Fahrenheit air when I need it to.  One of the problems I ran into on the secondary pour for the EZ Water on the harbor panel was a major leak along edge where the containment dam met the first layer of water effect.  Because this is an irregular edge, the molten resin flowed through the tiny gaps onto the tabletop and the water did not end up as deep as I wanted it.

In order to avoid a repeat on the second layer of water for the beach panel, I decided to build the containment dam and then melt a handful of resin pellets along the edge of the dam, then let them cool to form a seal with the dam and avoid leakage.  Seemed like an OK plan to me.  So I popped the pellets in and went to work melting them with Heat Fun.  It took a lot longer than I thought to melt the pellets with directly-applied superheated air, but after several minutes of blasting away at the highest setting I had the seal I wanted.  You can see where this is headed, can't you?

I let the seal cool and then heated up the rest of the bag of EZ Water pellets (way more than enough for the beach job).  Once they were molten I poured them in.  And poured, and poured, and poured.  Something was definitely wrong--I was dumping way too much resin into the basin, and the level was hardly rising at all.  I could not detect any leaks (my seal was working great!), but I could not figure out where the molten resin was going.  Only after I had poured the entire pan (it should have taken less than a quarter of the pan) did I feel I had added enough additional water effect to the beach panel.  I went to work with Heat Fun smoothing out the surface bubbles, completely perplexed as to where all the molten resin had gone. 

I let the resin cool and removed the containment dam and immediately saw the problem.  Heat Fun had melted away a huge slab of pink foam, leaving a thin shell of plaster in an area slightly larger than my hand.  No painting over that.  This had not been a problem on the harbor panel because we had lined the foam harbor walls with rock sheets cast from Merlin's Magic, creating a nice thermal barrier between Heat Fun and the foam.  The beach panel had no such barrier and I was staring at the cavernous result.  The EZ Water had flowed into the cavity and cooled directly onto the bare wood.  In essence I had made an underground grotto.  The ultra-thin plaster layer crumbled easily at the slightest touch.

It was bad.  I am confident that a 20mm plastic figure placed on the thin plaster would have easily fallen through.

I really only had one move at this point, two if you count 'rebuild the panel' as an option.  I got out a bag of pumice rocks and a tube of tacky glue and, very carefully and slowly, filled the accidental grotto as best I could.  Then, feeling smart about writing down the base plaster recipe, I masked the water effect in the area with tape, whipped up a fresh batch and frosted over the rock/glue filling.

It worked better than I thought it would.  Much better.  So, I had a huge scare, but it mended pretty well.  Still, I'll be using Heat Fun in tandem with thermal barriers from here out (that, or I'll be making my terrain boards out of rocks instead of foam from here out.)

It could have been much worse, as I had no idea I was obliterating the foam while I was melting pellets to seal the gaps in my containment dam.  Lucky I stopped when I did.

Surprisingly, I stopped taking pictures while I was freaking out about melting the foam, but here is the repair job (dark plaster is still wet.)  I put another layer on the adjoining harbor panel to tie the two spots together.

Once  the plaster dried, you could hardly tell that anything was ever amiss.  The wet sand effect in the picture below is a coat of acrylic gloss.

I'd rather be lucky than good.

North Africa Wargaming Table Project Part 2: Caulk Blaulked!

John and I took a large gaming table from pink foam to playable terrain in a day.  What we had so far was good enough, but we were shooting for spectacular.  We knew that there were still some tweaks required to turn this into a top-shelf terrain board.  So John helped me move the panels back down to the basement and then headed home feeling pretty damn good about things, while I immediately set to work, trying my hardest to destroy the project.

We already knew that we needed more water effect, so I ordered some.  There were also a couple of major faults (literally) with the project as well.  This was my next big lesson: chink seams with caulk or drywall tape before applying the  plaster/sand mix.  We assumed that the plaster would fill the seams between the foam panels.  It did not, and as a result there were linear grooves across the middle of each panel where the foam sheets came together.  These had to go.  So I grabbed some silicon caulk that had been laying around the basement for a few years and got to work.  While I was at it, I ran some caulk along the edges of the roads to give them a raised spoil from grading and use.

Those careful readers who have some experience in home renovation or general contracting doubtless have already spotted my next lesson.  For the rest of us, here it is: Silicon caulk has a shelf life.  The caulk I used had an expiration date of 2008 (for those far future readers just getting to this post, it was 2015 here on Earth at the time of the caulking in question.)  Turns out that seven years is enough time for silicon caulk to go bad.

I should have suspected something was amiss when the caulk came out.  Instead of being soft and sticky and hard to work with like melted plastic, it was thick and chalky.  This made it a dream to work with from a terrain-sculpting point of view, so I happily caulked away and let it dry overnight.  The next day I re-surfaced the caulked areas of the harbor panel with a fresh layer of plaster/sand mix.  This was when I notice the first real problem; the caulk had not cured.  It mixed with the plaster and turned the plaster mix into a pasty white substance that quickly hardened into rock that was not at all the color of the rest of the table.  It also did not adhere very well to the existing surface  It also obliterated the nice spoils I had raised along the roads.  Oh well, that's life, could be worse.  So I covered up the new white surface with a bunch of pigment and  stopped for the night.

The next day I awoke refreshed and hustled down to the basement to check on the products of the previous days' work.  In all the places where I had caulked the night prior, dark oil stains now shown through the plaster and pigment.  The good news was I no longer had an (easily fixable) problem with seams between panels.  No, now I had a problem that might require stripping and resurfacing the entire table.  I didn't tell John about any of this.

I took a couple of days off from the project to think of a solution. 

The only real good idea I has was to not plaster over the uncured caulking on the other four panels.  I have a thing for the obvious.  I gave it a few more days, hoping the caulk would dry.  It didn't.

I gave up hope and scraped the caulk off the other three panels, then mixed very thick plaster to fill the joints between the foam sheets.  Then I resurfaced these areas.  It looked passable.  I waited anxiously overnight for the plaster to dry, and was very relieved when I woke to find no oil stains on the remaining panels (though it is since emerged).

Well, maybe I can cover up the oil stains with more pigment.  Yeah, I really thought that.

So I did.  I went back over all the surfaces, re-doing the roads with a slightly darker mix, darkening the wadis and draws, layering the pigments deeply with pretty heavy-handed application, and using a couple of different blends for the highlights to make sure our desert floor had some nice, interesting color variations.  It looked good.  Except for the dark oil stains that had grown even darker with the application of more pigment.  I was flailing.  I didn't have the bandwidth to cope, so I dropped the oil stain problem and tried to solve a different problem--pigment fixing.

On our initial build, John had applied pigment raw and not used a fixer.  We discussed whether to fix the pigment or not.  The raw pigment gave the table a beautiful dusty look, because, well, dust, but we ended up conceding that unfixed pigment would be too messy to deal with.  So I wrestled with the logistics of fixing pigment covering a 6'x8' surface.  What to use?  How to apply?  John wisely vetoed my idea of using a spray bottle to apply the fixer (he still had no idea how much damage I had done to the table since he left, but I think he was starting to suspect that things might be amiss.)  I decided to go with mineral spirits, which is what I use to fix pigments on my models.  It worked fine.  I used a big fat mop brush to dab a couple of quarts of mineral spirit onto the table panels.  It got a little messy and pigments got mixed, but for a terrain project of this scale the sloppy pigment mingling actually worked well to tie all of the colors together.  And then the coolest thing happened...I ran out of mineral spirits before I finished the fixing job.

All I had left in the house was denatured alcohol, so I figured, "What the hell," and continued the fixing job with it.  Totally different from the mineral spirits, denatured alcohol lacks that really awesome capillary action that you find with mineral spirits.  It runs across the surface of the board like water.  Which, when you are covering a terrain board with dusty pigments, creates an erosion effect that is mind-blowingly true to life.  Accidental Brilliance.  Where I had layered the pigments the flow of the alcohol served just like water eroding soil and distributed the pigments perfectly like runoff.  I would not recommend denatured alcohol for models because it is hard to control, but for terrain there is no better Pigment Fixer/Magical Erosion Effect Juice.

Here is what denatured alcohol does to heavily layered pigments on terrain boards.  This is approximately a 6"x4" patch.  The dark bits are roads.

Here you can see the right-side panels still wet from mineral spirits.  Don't do this inside.  It will kill your brain.  Trust me (or ask my Wife, who gets to deal daily with my shredded memory).

At this point I was nearly overcome by the fumes in my basement so I moved the project out to the back porch to finish the pigment fixing.


Fixed pigment on the right, unfixed pigment on the left.  I was saving this picture to freak-out John, but then I tried to destroy the table for real (more on that later) and didn't think it was so funny anymore.

So things started out a little rough, but I felt I had the chaos pretty well under control now.  The colors on the table were fantastic.  The denatured alcohol was a terrain pigment fixing miracle.  Sure, the oil stains were still there, but the cool erosion effects made the rest of the table look so neat that some of the oil stains were starting to look like they were there on purpose.  John would never have to know how close I came to wrecking our project.  In fact he might even congratulate me on some perfectly-executed oil spills.  No, not really.

But I was doing some brilliant stuff with the table.  Yes, mostly on accident, but I had dodged a bullet or two and was feeling pretty confident now.  I had this terrain stuff down; what could possibly go wrong?

Two words: Heat Gun

North Africa Wargaming Table Project Part 1: We Are Really Good at This

Not long after our gaming group's inaugural wargame, John and I set to work planning the next step in our North Africa WWII wargaming odyssey.  We wanted a coastal city so we could build a port and play with water effects (neither of us had done this in any significant volume before.)  We also needed it to be modular for ease of transport.  Our goal was a transportable table that offered flexible playing area while meeting the highest standards of appearance.  Being relative novices in the realm of high-end terrain construction, much of the project took us into uncharted waters, and we had many accidental triumphs that have become standard procedures, as well as many failures that can provide cautionary tales for those who follow us.  Did we succeed?  Read on and judge for yourself...   

We kicked-around a couple of ideas and decided on four 3'x4' 1/4" plywood panels, because that's what I had in the basement.  This would give us a nice, big 6'x8' playing surface made of lightweight panels that fit into the trunk of my car.  I framed the panels with 1"x1" lumber to prevent them from warping.  The frame also allows us to clamp the panels together once finished.  I then topped the panels with pink foam and subsequently sculpted the foam using wire brushes to give us the topography were were after.  This is very messy-but I think the results are worth it.  Many thanks to my wife, Sacha, for generally putting up with the pink snowstorm in the basement.

Here you can see the harbor cut to fit on one of the panels.  In the background you can see the framed gaming table panels.

Lehman Russ tank added for reference.

I needed some weights to hold the foam flush with the wood while the glue dried.  There is no problem that alcohol cannot solve.  Here are the two coastal panels side-by-side.

A close up of the beach area shaped using wire brush.  I used two brush sizes: 1.5" for bulk foam removal and a .5" brush for finer details.  I would also recommend lightly roughing the entire surface of the foam (not just the shaped contours) using a wire brush to give the plaster (see below) a stronger bond with the foam.  I did not do that for this project, and the plaster tends to break off a little too easily from the smooth, unshaped foam surfaces.

In addition to the port, we wanted an escarpment to give us some high ground.  Here you can see the two escarpment panels taking shape.

I didn't like the boxy look of the highest hill (above), so I carved a road into the ridge line and cut a road defile into the highest ground to break-up the square edges a little.  The lesson learned here is to cut your foam in the shape you want to avoid straight lines.  That may be obvious to you all, but I needed to make the mistake in order to understand it.  Lots of that going on in this project, as you will see.

Speaking of lessons, here was my first big one.  Glue is important.  Use the right glue for the right job.  Wood glue worked great for binding the foam to the wood panels, but was not the best for binding foam to foam.  The bond is pretty brittle and the foam slabs started to separate as I moved the panels around.  Tacky glue retains some flex and bonds better to foam than wood glue, so use that instead.  Also, a corollary to the Tacky Glue law is using screws to hold the foam together while the glue dries.  This prevents any "drift" while the glue forms a permanent bond and ensures that the foam slabs do not separate while the glue dries.  Above and below you can see dots where I used sheet rock screws in the foam.  When you do this, be sure to countersink the screws so the heads are flush or below the level of the foam, but be careful not to over-rotate the screws and strip the holes.  You need the threads to remain engaged with the foam. 

So the table was all foamed and carved and glued and screwed and ready for finishing.  We decided to use plaster and pigment to coat the table.  The weather was perfect so we were able to move the project outside.  I cannot recommend doing what happened next inside-working with the plaster and pigment was extremely messy.  We fiddled around with mixture levels, mixing different ratios of plaster, sand, water, and pigment until we got the consistency we wanted.  The base layer that worked best for us was 10 Tablespoons of plaster, 10 Tablespoons of sand, 1 Tablespoon of pigment, and 15 tablespoons of water.  This starts out pretty runny, but thickens quickly.  You have about 3 minutes to work with it until it is no longer spreadable.  While it is still wet, you can use a cloth (or gloved hands) to smooth out any brush/trowel marks.  Sanding the surface after it dries is an option, but you will probably want to re-surface the sanded bits again with plaster.  Kind of depends on what you are after.  For our desert terrain we liked the rough texture of the plaster/sand mixture.

Once we got the surface on, John did a little bit of highlighting and road making with pigments, and, Viola!

A ready-to-play gaming table:

Ok, there was a bit more to it than that.  I wish I would have taken more (any!) pictures of the finishing work, but dealing with the plaster is a pretty frantic experience.  Once you start mixing it, you just have to go all-out until you have finished coating the panels.  Before we knew what had happened, 8 hours had passed and we had a gaming table. 

We started by plastering 2" tall bands of cast rock (Merlin's Magic) around the edges of the port and then sinking dowels into the sea floor to use as pilings.  Everything got a layer of plaster coating (though we left a good bit of the cast rock sheets exposed.)  John finished off the port area by cutting balsa wood planks to make the docks/wharf and added a couple of collapsed piers to complete the job.  He then used a light pigment on all the horizontal desert surfaces, which offset them nicely from the darker base pigment in the plaster.  Next he sketched-out the roads using dark pigment with light borders.  Finally, before we poured the water effects, John used dark brown and green pigment to shade the bottom of the port area.  The initial results were pretty neat.

Our initial pour of water effects was limited to what we had on-hand, and we realized that we would need to pour more at a later date.  We were pretty happy with the way the water effects combined with the pigments-good depth illusion due to the dark pigment around the edges.  John also cast a bunch of tires for use as pier bumpers.  These, plus chains, ropes, and other port detritus are scattered around on the seafloor.  The yellow tint of the EZ Water combined with the brown and green pigment to make the water look very polluted.  The overall effect gave the impression of a derelict port in the developing world.  Exactly what we were shooting for.

The pilings were lengths of dowel cut and coated with the plaster mix to make them heat resistant (this is important for any project in which you use heat and pour water effects.)

Sea vegetation--Woodland Scenic foam submerged in EZ Water.  You can also see some of the "cake icing effect" caused by the plaster drying before we could contour and texture it.  Once this happens, your only recourse is to chip it into something you like.  Doable, but a little tricky with water effect so near.

Some scattered brush here and there.

And there you have it--a fully functional table with some tanks sprinkled around for effect.

The table was beautiful.  The tanks looked great on it.  We were thrilled.

But we weren't done yet.  Not even close.

Read what happens next when I get ta thinkin'