Building Eylau Battlefield Part 2

     We got more work done on table the last few days. It still feels like we are struggling up hill. Once we get some paint on it I'll feel better. Of course it doesn't help that I'm building 2 tables for Cold Wars, Eylau and Frostgrave. I will start a blog on Frostgrave soon. Eylau is a much bigger project so it is consuming more of my time. 

Ok on to the pics

With the hills cut to shape we now sand them smooth. I'm using a Dewalt Random Orbital Sander, with dust bag. Now this generates a lot of dust, that is not healthy to breathe. We take steps to mitigate this dust. Dust collection, Dust Masks, Air Ventilation. 

 Instead of using the dust bag. We attach a ShopVac hose directly to the sander. The ShopVac also has a cyclonic dust separator to spin at the big particles out of the airstream into a secondary bucket. This prevents the ShopVac dust filter from clogging up.

 Using the sander, it allow us to shape the hills as needed. This helps us make the hills more smooth for game play and more realistic.

The hills are then hot glued to the table.

 The glue sets fast, but we add a little weight for about 5 minutes to get a good bond.

 Once the hills are in place we use light weight spackle to smooth out the gaps where the hill meets the table. This takes about a day to dry.

 All the spackling done.

 We are trying a new method for roads. This tool I made will "carve" or indent the outline of the road into the foam.

 After we have the road network down, we then carve/indent ruts into the roads. I didn't get a close up of that, but we are happy with the results. We felt this gives us a more realistic road than our previous methods.

Now paint is applied to the roads to get it into all the ruts. 

It's starting to look like a battlefield. Next up we have to sand and shape the hills now that they are on the table. Fix the river banks and we can start the main painting effort. 

Stay tuned, Xin/Jeff