Trench Warfare - part 1.

 

As I continue to drag myself forcibly out of the hobby funk I've been in for the previous could of months, I decided to make a start on some scratch-built terrain.

I've always watched terrain crafting videos on YouTube, and used to make various terrain projects with my late father. Granted these were for railway modelling, not Wargaming, but the basic skills* are all the same.

When I was building the table, I took the opportunity to rip some various size terrain bases from an extra sheet of 6mm MDF I had previously purchased.

Hills, Woods, Building bases and two sets of four foot long trench systems were planned out and ripped from the sheet. The edges being beveled to an angle with an electric sander**.

Cutting ahead in the photos here, I have already glued down the polystyrene which will form the scree of the trench, where the dirt has been thrown to create cover.

Craters were also dug into this at several points down the line.

I wasn't happy with the height of the trench compared to a model (these are game pieces after all not diorama's) and I wanted a little extra detail at the back, so I took some 5mm foamcore and added a small hollow all the way down the length of the trench. The idea is that the duckboards will be damaged or missing in places and this will give me a good way to add some limited water effects and variation to the flooring.

And the obligatory destroyed section from a direct hit.

As in the previous Crater build, it was on with the aluminium tin foil to smooth out the land forms.

And parts 1 and 2 together to see how they line up.

Then as per the previous build, it was on with the forbidden battery, of interior filler, PVA, brown paint and water mix to get a basic covering of the land down and to smooth out some areas.

Once this was dry, I did a second coat of it in. Few places, then covered the entire piece in OVA and builders sand before grabbing whatever nearly empty can of spray paint I could find (in this case Flames of War British Desert) and using that to lock in the sand layer.

I'm not entirely happy with the joins between sections,  it I can live with it, as once again, these are gaming pieces, they're going to get knocked about being out into storage and taken out for the games like.

At this point I decided to check what it was actually looking like with a few models.

I was quite happy with that, so turned my attention to the next step...

Duckboards, the wooden floorboards which stopped soldiers standing in water and mud for months on end and suffering from trenchfoot.

Not a job I was looking forward to but an essential one.

First step was to gather supplies, taking my son to our local McDonald's garnered these coffee stirrers which would be extremely useful...and cheap!

Then it was just on with the job of cutting them to length in bulk. A good podcast or film in the background helps with this immensely.

Once this was ready, with no other choice, it was down with the PVA and on with the boarding. Time consuming, but worth it.

I initially started off with water down PVA but it wasn't sticking. So I switched to neat PVA and once it had started to grab and I had the flooring done, I slapped a couple of coats of watered down PVA over the entire thing.

The same process was used with the wooded revetment (vertical) boarding which holds up the wall of the trench.

For supports I turned to a bag of BBQ skewers I had picked up at the end of the summer when everything was reduced in the supermarkets.

With some cheap superglue these were glued to every joint of the revetment boards and left to dry, leaving me with this.

The entire piece was then given another two or three coats of watered down PVA to seal and secure everything in place.

I'm working on the second section of trench and am aiming to get all four feet of this side done before I start painting it so it will match along the full length.

I'm going to go back in with some filler/paint mixture and add some built up dirt around the joins between the floor and wall, and maybe add a few crates and supplies up and down the length.

Nothing overtly period specific or 40k specific, as I have been eyeing up the Wargames Atlantic WW1 range which looks awesome and their STL additions are brilliant. So these trenches will remain generic in order to be used for multiple periods.

I'll post an update with the second part once it's at this stage.

Until next time, have nice day...

*Sadly, with the rise of plastic and pre-built terrain over the past years, these scratch-building skills seem to be dying out amongst hobbyists.

**I did so many in one go that I was joking that I would give myself vibration white finger (a disease caused by using vibrating power tools for extended periods of time over and over again, ex-miners suffer a lot with it. My father got a claim in the late 90s/early 00s when the UK government was paying out for it.