More on building 2-contour styro hill

My previous post (LINK) showed some pics of the first few steps of building this hill, namely:

(1) Carve contour out of 1.5" foam, using mix of coping saw, dovetail saw, utility knife, and X-acto hobby saw.

(2) Trace footprint of hill onto model aircraft plywood, cut plywood & glue to base of foam using white glue.

(3) Turn contour upside-down and stack books and reams of paper onto plywood so it dries and seals tightly.

(4) Cover carved foam edges with ELMER'S WOOD FILLER (or any similar material).

...we pic up the "story in pictures" below, having carved a 2nd contour and preparing to glue it down atop the first.

In the past I have kept my hill contours separate, for greatest versatility when laying out tabletop terrain, but since this new hill is being built primarily to look good, I decided to permanently glue the 2nd contour down, so the edges of both contours could be sloped and their surfaces textured to match my terrain boards.

NOTE: if you plan on using SPRAY-PAINT for your base or "primer" coat of paint, it is very important to COVER EVERY SPOT OF EXPOSED FOAM with wood filler or whatever spackle material you are using (I'm referring to those areas of foam which have not been covered with sand or pebbles). Any foam spots that are left bare and exposed to spray-paint will be eaten away by the aerosol spray. You can avoid this potential problem altogether by simply brushing on your base/primer coat with black latex house-paint.

COLORS:

I used the following colors for this hill, all of which -- except for the black base coat -- are identical to those used for my terrain boards:

1. BLACK

2. BROWN (matched to Delta Ceramcoat "Dark Brown")

3. FAWN (matched to Folk Art "Fawn")

4. HONEYCOMB (matched to Folk Art "Honeycomb")

5. MUDSTONE (matched to Delta Ceramcoat "Mudstone")

6. SANDSTONE (matched to Delta Ceramcoat "Sandstone")

7. RAIN GRAY (matched to Delta Ceramcoat "Rain Gray")

8. QUAKER GRAY (matched to Delta Ceramcoat "Quaker Gray")

9. Final highlight coat of SANDSTONE

I used successively lighter dry-brushing as I proceeded, going from near-total coverage with the first coat of BROWN, to a very light touch with the final coats of Quaker Gray and Sandstone.

BEFORE PAINTING I textured the surface of both contours.

First I dug some spots out of the foam surface and glued in some small WOOD-CHIPS, which are meant to look like large slabs of rock-face or boulders. In addition to simply looking good, I did this so the hill wood blend in better with the previous hill I made almost entirely out of wood-chips (LINK).

After adding a few wood-chips, I spread some scattered patches of WOOD FILLER on the contour surfaces as well. I started doing this when I first textured my terrain boards, because I didn't want them to look too "perfect" from edge to edge, with nothing but an unbroken stretch of sand. I felt like that would look more like the Sahara or Arabian Deserts, as opposed to the more mixed ground cover in most of Afghanistan, so I used the wood filler to break up the sand.

Once I'd done my wood filler patches, I spread out FULL STRENGTH WHITE GLUE onto a stretch of contour surface, then I hand-placed several small and medium size PEBBLES where I though they would look good, and only then did I pour rough sand (actually HOME DEPOT "SOIL EROSION" ballast, an incredible bargain at something like $3.00 for a 10-pound bag).

I also made sure to use glue on a few spots along the slopes/edges of the contours, where I thought it would look good for rocks and sand to be scattered and link together the rocks and sand on the upper and lower contours.

Once everything had tried and I'd reclaimed all the loose ballast, I applied a coat of Woodland Scenics "Scenic Cement" -- which is nothing more than watered-down White Glue -- to bond everything together with one last coat of adhesive.

After that dried, I spray-painted my base-coat of FLAT BLACK, and then commenced DRY-BRUSHING.

Whew!!!

To be honest, the carving, spackling and gluing is somewhat interminable, but it all leads up to the PAINTING, which goes really, really fast, and which I personally really enjoy.

That does it for the step-by-step narration -- now on to the visual aids...

Building a 2-contour HILL from 1.5" foam, wood filler, ballast & pebbles

Bad news: I just spent a couple hours loading up close to a hundred pics showing the process of building my new hill -- but unfortunately Blogger experienced a problem and this page I was working on lost them all. Needless to say, this kind of sucks, and after a very long day and night, I sadly can't summon the fortitude to go back and reload all those pics right now. If I'm very lucky maybe I can manage do it tomorrow night. But before I lost all that work, I had loaded up the handful of pics below, showing the very start of the process, which remained saved...

...and now for the good news: even though I didn't have the stick-to-it-tiveness to go back and reload all those myriad work-in-progress pics, I forced myself to put up a handful of pics showing the finished HILL, some of them with some figures added, as seen here:

As soon as I can manage it, I will repost all those other pics that fit in between the ones on top and on bottom. I'm very happy with how the hill turned out, and I want to share as much info as possible on how I built it.

"MAIWAND SATURDAY" at Colonial Barracks in Metairie, Louisiana, Nov. 4th-6th

Word got out about a week ago that "Maiwand Day" will be participating in the first ever all-TSATF gaming convention, "Colonial Barracks," to be held on the weekend of November 4th through 6th, at the Sheration Metairie-New Orleans Hotel in Metairie, Louisiana.

I haven't said anything about it here until now, maybe because it still seems like such a crazy idea, even to me, but with the support of my very understanding wife, I will be going through with it.

The idea was suggested to me months ago, by Patrick Wilson of The Virtual Armchair General. It took me a couple of months to decide in favor of packing up my terrain and armies and driving 1895 (not a bad number for a trip to play TSATF!) miles from Los Angeles LA to Louisiana LA, but in the end I couldn't pass up the opportunity to meet Larry Brom -- author of The Sword And The Flame -- in person and enjoy having my set-up and scenario be part of such a fun and, for those of us who have loved, do love, and will always love TSATF, noteworthy event.

As I've said before, I have been playing the rules since they were first published in 1979, when I was 14 years old, and they have enabled me to enjoy many tabletop moments of triumph and moments of tragedy. It's my hope and expectation that a bunch of new players ("new" to me at least, no matter how longstanding their experience of playing with the rules may be!) will enjoy "Maiwand Saturday" at the convention.

I hope to post more info on details of the game, exactly how many spots for players, the exact orders of battle, maybe some of the scenario specific rules, etc., etc., as soon as I get a chance, which hopefully will be before the event arrives!

In the meantime here's a link to the convention page at "Sergeants3" -- the website devoted to sales of TSATF, its variations, supplements, and scenario books, and various other Larry Brom rules sets:

LINK TO SERGEANTS 3 COLONIAL BARRACKS CONVENTION PAGE

Maiwand will be played on Saturday, November 5th. It's a BIG GAME, requiring a good deal of time (fastest we have ever played it was 4-5 hours, and it certainly could go longer), with room for 3 British players (infantry/C-in-C, cavalry, & baggage) and from 5 to 8 Afghan players.

I'm hoping at least 2 and possibly 3 of my fellow "Maiwand Day" veterans (including my 14 year-old son) will be flying in to help me set up and run things at the convention.

If I had time to spare I would try to schedule stop-ins for some games along the way from Los Angeles to New Orleans (I plan to take a pretty straight route via Pheonix, Tuscon, Juarez, San Antonio and Houston), but I'm expecting to spend 3 days on the road each way, which is already a ton-and-a-half of time away from home, in addition to the 3 days spent at the con, so I'll have to settle for well-wishing wargame "drive-bys" to fellow gamers (especially of the colonial variety!) along my route instead.

On the miniatures front, I recently finished converting helmets for enough Pontoonier figures to serve as the 66th Regt. component of the BAGGAGE GUARD command at Maiwand and shipped them off to Brooklyn today. So if the talented Igor Olshansky can paint them brilliantly and send them back within the next week or two, they should be available to be christened in battle at the convention.

On the terrain front, I just put finishing touches on a long-standing AFGHAN HILL project I've been intermittently working on for many months. I need to take some time and post the usual ton of pics I took of the construction and painting process. I hope to do so before the end of this weekend.

One last "Maiwand Saturday at Colonial Barracks" note:

I'd like to say a very sincere THANK YOU to Nick Stern and Bob Abra of San Francisco for generously supplying me with an additional unit of sword-armed Indian Cavalry, to play the part of the mounted component of the British baggage guard. They are Bob's beautiful figures, which will be carefully packed and shipped to me by Nick. If not for their kind assistance, I'd be forced to employ Bengal Lancers or perhaps even the 10th Hussars, to fill this gap in my army list, which would somewhat depress an obsessive-compulsive nut such as myself. So once again, THANKS VERY MUCH GENTLEMEN!

The 66th Regt, helmet covers, chin-straps & THE HUMAN ELEMENT

For followers and repeat visitors to this humble blog it will come as no surprise that I am somewhat obsessed with the uniforms, equipment & weapons used by the Afghan, British, Indian troops present at the 1880 battle of Maiwand.

Over the past months I've discussed how I converted miniature units of Bombay infantry, Bombay cavalry, and British artillery, in order to make them more accurately reflect what those units are said to have looked like at the battle. The last such conversion needed in order to complete my miniature version of General Burrows' army at Maiwand, is the 66th (berkshire) Regiment of British line infantry.

I had used the same unit of miniatures as the 66th for all 3 of the Maiwand games I have played (a few are on view in the masthead photo above). They are beautifully sculpted minis from the Perry Sudan range, beautifully painted by a professional painter in Australia (on another front, I only wish I knew his exact identity and how to contact him to commission some work!). But, aside from wearing khaki and carrying Martini-Henry rifles, they are not very historically accurate. To wit:

(1) their helmets have puggarees rather than smooth cloth covers with leather chin-straps hooked up to the top;

(2) their pants legs hang loose at the ankles rather than wrapped in puttees;

(3) their "Valise" pattern ammunition pouches are painted white, matching the rest of their leather equipment, rather than black.

Painting pouches black instead of white is no big deal, but puttees, helmet covers and hooked-up flat leather chin-straps are another story.

It took awhile but I finally tracked down British infantry figures wearing puttees, carrying Martini-Henrys (rather than the later magazine-fed Lee-Metford ), and wearing Valise pattern equipment (rather than the earlier "pouch-belt" style with rolled greatcoats worn across the shoulder en-banderole).

The figures are from the Pontoonier Miniatures Third Burma War range, available from Newline Designs in the UK: LINK TO PONTOONIER THIRD BURMA WAR BRITISH

There's only one thing on them that doesn't fit: their helmets also have puggarees wrapped around them.

The labor-intensive-but-still-relatively-easy part of the fix was slicing, filing and sanding off the puggarees, but the much harder part for me was finding a way to add a perfectly uniform size chin-strap to each of 20+ helmets.

I started out thinking I'd use 2-part epoxy modeling clay, like "green-stuff" and did 2 samples. Problem was, after a great deal of work, I wound up with long, thin, CURVED straps, rather than flat ones. So... in hopes of finding something like a spool of thin FLATTENED wire, I visited my local hobby store. Lucky for me, working that day was a very knowledgeable and helpful guy I've known for a few years. I had brought one of my figures and explained in excruciating detail what I was looking for. It took him a few minutes but he FOUND EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED:

...teeny-tiny strip styrene. Small enough AND flat enough to work as leather chin-straps for my 28mm figures (as opposed to rounded chain-link straps).

If not for the HUMAN ELEMENT, I would have failed. I've bought other -- much larger -- pieces of Evergreen Scale Models merchandise (big flat pieces of plastic to use as bases for terrain), but I had no idea they made such minuscule items.

Needless to say, if it hadn't been for the presence of that trusty fellow at the hobby shop, I would never have found the solution to my problem. Like what I assume to be a very large number of my fellow hobbyists, these days I spend most of my hobby dollars via the internet, rather than at my local "brick-&-mortar" hobby shop. There's nothing wrong with that and I would guess it is not going to change, other than becoming an even more common practice. Nonetheless, this has reminded me that there will always be times when the key ingredient is the HUMAN ELEMENT -- when you need an actual STORE complete with a living, breathing HUMAN BEING knowledgeable enough to help you out.

Here's some pics of the first two chin-straps I added -- actually the only two I've done so far --using small amounts of long-acting "slo-zap" super-glue. I need to do a bunch more, but I'm happily convinced this is the right way to go, as it results in perfectly uniform dimensions for the added straps, as is appropriate for a piece of industrial-age military equipment.

***PS To be brutally honest, even these figures are not ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, since they wear full Valise equipment, rather than the stripped down "belt-order" version usually worn on campaign in Afghanistan, where the greatcoat/blanket and mess tin would usually be carried by the baggage train, but it's still pretty dang close, and I'm sure there were occasions when such full equipment was worn.