Hey Dustan your PM?

[tabletop]

Judging from perplexed txts from Ellen, the molds may have already arrived!

[tabletop]

Ah nope, microscope slides! Dang

[Dustan]

Rats Hey guess what. On topic again (sort of), I sucessfully vacuformed some weatherboard textured plastic.

WOOT! I can make plastic crap!

On the down side I tried to make a vacuform of your first facade

It worked, quite well.
BUT:
The plastic popped in the windows between the sashes
and sadly when removing the vacuform from the master the baster cracked in several places.

The part thats not SO bad is that the master cracked mostly because of the voids and bubbles that were on the reverse side of the facade.

It did not die in vain, it gave me a load of good 'scientific' data about the limitations

[tabletop]

Dustan man! PHOTOS!!!!

[tabletop]

But by god that does sound interesting. I considered making a vacuum forming table when our last hovermatic died, but couldn't find a source of cheap thermoplastic in Auckland.

[tabletop]

If you want a better form how about simply pulling the + bars out of the windows altogether? People can just add them back in later with match sticks if they want (they were original sculpted with those too). Would that give you a cleaner form?

Did it manage to pick up all the facade surface details otherwise?

Goddamnit man!!!! Photoosososososos!!!!

[Dustan]

Yeah I will be making a update on my site tonight or on the weekend.

Yes it picked up a huge amount of the detail right down to the little scrolls and insets =D I sprayed the inside of that form with a bit of OLD grey primer to make the details stand out but it was to cold to go fishing for my camera and cord.

I am going to see about making a plug for making brick walls as well it will be a bit of a tricky pug as it will be:

|            |
|Brick     |
|_______|
|Cap       |
|_______|
|            |
|Brick     |
|            |

The idea being that if I can heat a straight line (resistance wire + Rig) then it can be bent to shape and glued to foamcore. This should allow me to make up to 11" lengths of unbroken wall and if I am cunning I will even be able to make corners this way.

Another thing i want to make plugs for is 6" squared ground tiles. What would be realy neat is to have a selection of HA stones form them on
The advantage of this is that with enough stones I can build and kind of form and taking them out of the plastic will be cake because they wont be a solid mass. the middle will drop out and the sides may need a wriggle.

If the tiles arent rigid enough I would probably find a way to fill them with sawdust. I have LOTS of sawdust =D

[tabletop]

Shit man now I wanna build a vacuum table. If it can pick up that level of detail it would be sweet. One sided I guess, but hell I could sculpt you a million one sided things to vacuum form . Hills, bunkers, craters etc. etc. are all blindly obvious (if not somewhat dull) options.

What's the material cost on your plastic sheet though? How much would you have to charge for a cast to make money?

[tabletop]

Cast a bunch of fieldstone #70 in the weekend in preparation for new #75 mold hopefully sometime this week.

Also planned a simple two part wargaming table to play Song of Blades and Heroes over and cut up some MDF and resurrected my hot wire cutter. I want to make a sort of 'Keep on the Borderlands' style table that consists of two 600x600mm squares that can be arranged four ways into a 600x1200mm table. There's a river and a road fording it on one edge and I plan to make a fieldstone tower for the centre of one board. With the fieldstone mold #75 I can make the base of the tower ruined and just stack another piece on top to make it un-ruined! Then I'll have to paint up some more figures for Song of Blade and Heroes games.

[tabletop]

Wondering how the shit I can cut DOW blue into gentle hills though. Probably going to be a lot of toxic sanding :/

[Dustan]

Build a hot wire rig.

I knocked one together which has a X:Y 4":1" ratio. Initial tests show this is a good ratio to stop models falling over. the rig has a piece of MDF with a hole through 8" from an edge and a post screwed to the side with a hole run through at 2" from the platform top. I just screwed the wire down with leades attached to a 12v 1a DC supply. 15v 1.6a DC would be better but I didnt have any supplies like that.

Nicrome wire is cheap but old hair driers and toasters are more readily available. Any resistance wire will do =D

Never use AC power and take all care with it as it gets pretty hot.

If you use terminal posts or the like to connect the power supply then you can build lots of rigs and just move the supply between them easily. the only other 2 I ever use are bows and wands (like a nunchuck with resistance wire instead of chain).

Heck you could probably even use the Arduino as a variable teperature controller (if it can alter the amount of V and A it can pump out

[tabletop]

oh I've got a hot wire cutter, made from electrical tape, some nichrome wire and a bent coat hanger attached to a 1amp 12V AC adapter . It's just the arm isn't long enough to cut really smooth hills easily so I usually resort to sanding. I should just knuckle down and get on with it. Cut the basic forms with a bread knife and tidy them up with the hot wire.

How would you cover a large area with grass? I have some cheap model rail road matting but I'm pretty sure it's not going to stand up to much gaming over (you can scrape the 'grass' off with a thumbnail). I guess I could just FLOCK THE SHIT out of the hills...

Any other suggestions?

[Dustan]

Ados f2 contact adhesive spray + bag of flock + 1-2 weeks drying = win

The ados doesn't melt any polystyrenes I have tried it on. It's Owesoms (and at bunnings)


BTW Here is my 4:1 rig and a shot of models standing on the incline.

[tabletop]

Nice rig. ADOS spray on adhesive you reckon. Sold!

[tabletop]

Hmm about $18 for a can. How much does that cover you reckon? Like I said, I'm looking at 600 x 1200mm and probably maybe 2/3rds of that needs grass.