Building Marengo Battlefield, Part 2

So our building continues on Marengo. Lets dive right in.

When we last left our tale, we had done a rough cut on the hills.

 Using a random orbital sander to smooth out the hills. Do this outside as the dust is toxic.

Gluing the hills down to the table with Liquid Nails.

 Carving out small streams with a dremel and a router attachment I picked up at a garage sale. The cutting Dremel bits really work well on the foam. The grinding bits melt the foam.

Using lightweight spackle to make the hills gentle rises. So spackle, let dry, sand, spackle, let dry, then finish sand.

We also use spackle in the river bed. The Surform leaves big holes sometimes, and lots of nooks and crannies.

Adding really low hills to the river loops, more like gentle rises. Using foam core.

 Spackling the low hills.

 We have previously drawn out the road network. Now we will lay down the road surface. With the road network down, this will help us work out our patterns of fields.

 We paint the road down, then dump a ton of Woodland Scenics Fine Brown Ballast on the paint. The paint makes a great adhesive and if the ballast comes up, the brown surface helps hide the missing cover.

We take the boards apart, and dump the excess ballast on to newspaper so we can dump it back in the bottles. No waste. Here is the road work after dumping the excess.

 Blocking out major terrain features. In this case, vineyards. Marengo had a lot of vineyards. We are not sure how we are going to do the vineyards, but we have some ideas. When trying new things we do a lot of experimental builds on scrap foam board.

The fields are laid out, and we start flocking them.

 We use the same process for fields as we do the road. Use paint as an adhesive. Pour a ton of flock on the boards. Let it dry and dump off the excess and recover it. We do one color at a time to stop the flock colors from mixing.

 More colors added. This process is a bit slow. We pour the flock on the paint and have to walk away for a few hours till it drys. We could dump off sooner I suppose, but we want to make sure the flock sticks.

Now it's starting to look like a battle table.


Next build, more flock, more flock and more flock. Also start on the river, getting it ready for the water pour. And the daunting task of the vineyards.

Xin