Building Aspern-Essling Battlefield, Part 2

We are back again with some more updates on our table for Historicon. No matter how much time we think we have, it is never enough. And life is always getting in the way. Ok lets get on with the pics.

 After the light weigth spackle drys, we give it a quick sand to smooth out spackle ridges. I should have spackled more of the river bed. Getting paint in those crevices is a f'ing pain.

 We use Jeff's Fabulous Road Tool(patent pending) to score roads into the foam. After the outside of the roads is marked, then we go back and score in ruts. This takes a bit of time.

 Painting the roads. Again getting the paint in the ruts ARGGHHHH!

 Now block painting in the rest of the board. Base field color and village footprints.

 Hard to see, but I was testing different shades of paint for the base color. In the end it really doesn't make that much different as 95% of the board will be covered with flock.

Our resident sculptor Lou has given us some more buildings. I am making a mold using Smooth-On PMC 121/Wet. The only reason I use this particular type is the local model train store stocks it.

 My home made vibrating table using a hand held back massager that I got for Fathers Day 3 years ago. It not pretty but it gets the job done. 24 hours to set.

Work on the table gets interrupted as I got my very small delivery from Dwarven Forge Kickstarter. So we took some time to play with the few sets I got. My kids being in college as really put the brakes on my Dwarven Forge crack habit.

 Painting the river a yucky scummy green.

 Now the entire board has paint on it!!!

We have to go back over the board and fix overpaints and missing spots in the foam. I also edge the shore lines with a muddy color.

More updates to come and at a faster pace as we run out of time, again.....

Xin/Jeff, Alan, Bob and Lou

Building Aspern-Essling Battlefield, Part 1

Well once again there is no adult supervision in my basement.We will be running 6 events at Historicon. The battle of Aspern-Essling 3 times, and I will be running Frostgrave 3 times.

We start off with building another huge table, 6x12 feet for Aspern-Essling. Lets get right to the pictures.

 We start off with 3 sheets of Kingspan insulation from Lowes. Each sheet is 4 feet by 6 feet and 2 inches thick. We would prefer using the pink insulation from Owen Corning, but we could not find the size we wanted. In our opinion the pink board is better than the blue or green board. The color of the foam is green, but that doesn't show in the pictures.

Using our patented glass bead method we lay out major terrain features on the board. Rivers, roads, towns and hills. We use the glass beads cause that allows so to see the board and make adjustments till we think the layout is historical and fits on the boards. After we are happy with the position of all the terrain features we draw them in with different colored sharpies.

We took a break from building to organize our lead. It was still a bit of a jumble from our Eylau game Cold Wars. We also had to take inventory and figure out what additional units we needed for Aspern-Essling. Turns out a lot! A very big order was placed to Old Glory. All the figures we use are 10mm Old Glory. Thank god for the Old Glory Army membership.

It took a few days but we are all sorted. We love these troop trays from Dave's Baggage Terrain. All our figures are mounted on metal base stands from Wargame Accessories. The troop trays are lined with sheet magnets which keeps all our little gus firmly in place.

With the figures all put away, we are back to building the table. Aspern-Essling has a lot of water features. They will feature prominently on our table. We are using a Dewalt router to carve out the rivers and islands. It was hard to see the lines drawn while routing so we added some LED lights to the router.

The Danube carved into the insulation.

All done. A note of caution when working with foam insulation. The particles are toxic to breathe. We have a Shop Vac attached directly to the router with an air filter on it. We also wear dust masks and we have fans venting the basement to the outside. As we work. Once done we leave the basement for 30 minutes to let the air clear. The shop vac handles the majority of the work.

We use X-acto knives to carve in river banks.

 To further smooth out the rivers bank we use light weight spackle. This takes a day to dry.


That's all for now, more to come. Thanks for Stopping by,

Xin/Jeff