Building Eylau Battlefield Part 5 and Final Setup

The convention is over, the games have been run and we are back home. It was a good time had by all. Despite our horrific time management skills, we got the table completed.

For the sake of completeness, I have the final build steps and pictures of the completed project for this last post.

I do not have pics during the game as I was running my Frostgrave game at the same time, but maybe someone else will post them.

As I've recounted earlier, Tuesday before the convention was supposed to be a full day of building Eylau and Frostgrave. The weather had other plans. We were hit with the worst storm of the winter, and lost power about 11am. Didn't get it back till sometime after 3pm. I spent about 45 minutes trying to get the generator going to no avail.

So I had to work in the dark, and I did.

  Working with a headlamp I did some finishing touches on Eylau, and painted some figures I needed for Frostgrave.

All the streams and lakes were poured 2 part resin. This takes 24 hours to dry. The plan was early pour on Tuesday, and not touch the board till Wednesday. The power outage pushed the pour back by 5 hours. So in effect it pushed the snow flocking back by 5 hours on Wednesday.

 All the streams that go off the board need to be dammed. I used plastic card and low temp hot gluel.

Ready for pour.

We use Enviro Tex Lite Pour-On High Gloss. When it cures it is rock hard.

Using model railroad ballast and hot glue to make stone wall for the Eylau graveyard. Building it on waxpaper first, then the whole thing just lifts off and can be glued down to the board.

We started Flocking about 6:30PM. As I mentioned earlier in another quick update post, we ran out of snow flock.

My wife volunteered to drive the 55 minutes to Maplewood Hobbies in Maplewood NJ to get the one bottle they had. Funny Story, I had called to see if they had stock and asked the bottle to be held and my wife would pick it up. When she gets there the guy running the store asked what her husband was building, and she told him a big battle table for a convention. Well he asks if I was Xintao, cause he had been following my blog. LOL.  

Eylau, needs more snow!

Done, ready for transport.

Here we are setting up in the Lancaster Host Resort. Troops just starting to hit the table.

All the troops set up.

Here's the "aerial shot" from the staircase next to our game.

We won 2 PELA's, for Friday night. Both Eylau and Frostgrave. Then on Saturday night we won Best in Show. Thank you HMGS.

Thanks to all of you who stopped by and admired our work. Thanks to all the kind comments online. Thanks to the wives for not filing for divorce.

I hope you enjoyed the journey of our insanity we call Wargaming.

Now we have 2 weeks to decide how to top this for Historicon.

Cheers

Eylau is done

About 6pm we started putting on the snow flock. We had 4 shaker bottles of snow. It wasn't enough. We realized this about 7pm, just as the 2 closest hobby stores were closing. I called Maplewood Hobbies cause I knew they stayed open late for gaming. They had one bottle. My wife volunteered to drive the 55 minutes to get it. She is awesome. Big thanks to Maplewood for getting us out of a tight spot.

Not alot of pics. It's 2:21 and I am just taking a break from painting my Frostgrave table. We might tweak the table a little in the morning, but it is ready to go.

Night all.

Building Eylau Battlefield Part 4

I had a day off, and Alan, Bob and Lou all came out. We got a lot done. It feels we have really turned a corner on the build. Lets get right to the pics.

 Lou is the primary figure painter. He paints to a good standard, but incredible fast. Also his eye site is way better than mine. Here are the Prussians he did.

 10mm from Old Glory

 We needed some more Russians as well.

Russians bring a lot of guns to the party.

Bob is not going to make Cold Wars, but he came out and pitched in with the basing.

Laying hedgerows.

We came up with a new method for our hedgerows. In the past we glued individual chunks of foliage a piece at a time. Easily the longest part of the build.

I had an inspirational thought. We get a fuzzy brown yarn, spray it with adhesive and dip it in flock.

Is it perfect? No. It is however a good balance between aesthetics and efficiency.  

 One board section down, two to go. We started adding in trees too.

 Grinding through a lot of roads and fields.

 Just a bead of Elmer's glue and a strip of hedgerow gets the job done.

All 3 board sections done with the trees and hedges. 

We still have to make bridges, paint the buildings, dress up the villages, pour the streams, and last but not least put snow on EVERYTHING.

Still grinding away, 

Xin

Building Eylau Battlefield Part 3

Welcome to the 3rd installment of, "I'm running out of time terrain building." Honestly we started earlier on this project than we did with the others, but it seems with more time available, we waste more time.

I think once again paint will be drying in the car, on the way to the convention. We are idiots. Anyway lets crack on with the pictures.

Not very exciting is it? I mentioned before our router melted the edges of the river. It's now very hard and crusted. Difficult to slope the river bank.

 I had been struggling with sanding the edges, but a poster, HobbyDr, on TMP, suggested cutting the river outline before routing, and that made me thing about cutting away the melted sections. Huzzah!

 Hills spackled and sanded. Road network laid out. Ready for paint.

 We came up with this idea of the little flags to identify the villages because we are about to paint over the names written on the foam. We have about 10 villages on the table.

 We wanted to get a base coat down and make sure we get paint into all the nooks and crannys. The paint looks orange-ish in the picture, it is darker in real life and drys much darker.

 Ugh, I just grabbed a random color for the villages, but it is so bright I hate it. They will get repainted.

 We've started casting up our buildings. We will need around 100 of them. These buildings were sculpted by Lou, who does a lot of our troop painting. Also he is an amazing scratch builder.

 Waiting for paint to dry.

 Hmmm, hard to see, but we are laying out the order in which we are doing the rest of the major steps. A lot of moving parts to coordinate, snow flock, hedges and walls, pouring water, buildings and villages, woods, swampy ground. Some of those interfere with others. Click on the pic for a larger version.

 Did a 2nd coat on the roads, and rivers, and more filling in those nooks. The foam has a lot of small imperfections that the paint does not want to get in. So we keep finding the green foam showing through.

 Yeah, so....when you forget a hill....

We thought we had all the major features done and painted. Roads, woods, villages. rivers. We missed about 2 feet of road in the center of the board. Grrrr.


Ok thanks for looking if anyone is. More to come.
Xin