Search for La Maisontaal- bridge and board

Remember that bridge? Well, it IS that bridge! Hoorah, we were looking at the other side of it. The elderly vacuum form plastic was quite brittle so I have epoxied the cracks and infilled with dental plaster. Now mounted on MDF boards it should be durable enough to march a regiment of orcs over.

All our students have gone home for the summer now, hooray! I can put one of the big workshop tables to use laying it all out. Time to make the boards then. Ordinarily I would use high density extruded foam for my modular terrain boards. It's stronger, carves better, holds sharp edges etc. etc. BUT I wanted to be a bit more authentic and I suspect that the original board would have been standard 1" polystyrene ceiling tiles so I bought cheap expanded polystyrene tiles to use. The postage was as much as the tiles themselves and I think all in they cost under £25 which for an 8x4 base board is bargain. Fortunately there's not much (apart from the river, nothing in fact) surface undulation, they might just as well have been flat wooden tiles! They're actually a tad smaller than 2' square but that 5mm doesn't make a whole lot of difference. Because they are very brittle I have mounted them on some 9mm MDF. Also means I have a nice smooth surface to paint my river onto. The tiles were too big to put through a bandsaw or hotwire cutter so I hacked them with a stanley knife. Nice rough, rocky riverbank edges.

I've covered the polystyrene in two layers of a diluted PVA/Filite mix. Filite is an additive powder usually used in fibreglass and plaster casting applications. Mixed with the PVA (wear a mask, use extraction etc.) it's a poor man's Jesmonite and forms a nice hard shell over the foam, protecting it from dents and knocks. After that was dry I gave the top of each tile a smooth coat of PVA and dumped sand on top until the wet patches where the glue is soaking into the grains stopped coming through. When it was completely dry I tipped off the excess and gave the tile a spray with Isopropyl alcohol (smelly, wear a mask, ventilate etc.) then soaked it with very diluted PVA, about 75% water. Then I sprinkled a bunch more sand on top and again left it to dry overnight. The top surfaces are now rock hard and have a suitable base texture (and colour actually) to work onto. But, the bridge is looking lonely, let's see if we can do something about that.

Some years back I converted all the Townscapes buildings into files for laser cutting, so it was a quick and easy job to find the bits I needed for this layout. They're all Dave Andrews (I presume) models either using the Townscapes buildings as templates or possibly prototypes that the eventual card buildings were based on. There's the mill, cottage, farmhouse, watch tower, barn, half timbered house and loo. 

The pictures of the village part of the build are grainy and difficult to see clearly, but should give me enough information to do the balsa wood framing etc. If anyone knows of pictures of these exact buildings turning up in other publications at the time do let me know! I actually already have all of these buildings made up, but as I did them without reference to these pictures I'm going to do them again getting as close as I can.

I've also cut myself a bunch of bases for the hedgerows, fences etc. Many of these are coconut/coir fibre hedgerows but there are some fences in there as well which Mike thinks are Merit. I've guestimated the size of the hedges etc. from the bases of units around them and I think they look pretty close. 120mmx20mm with angled ends to bend around curves. I've now used this placement to mark in the road for painting.

 Beginning to start looking like something!