20 mm FENCES FOR CHAIN OF COMMAND (CoC)

My grandson asked if I could build up some 20mm picket fences for his CoC gaming. Always willing to encourage his interest in the hobby, I undertook the project as follows:

I used a scrap piece of MDF as a manufacturing base and applied a couple of strips of 2-sided scotch tape to hold the fence while under construction. Two "Coffee Stirrer" sticks cut to 6" length form the support for the fence and an identical length of "popsical stick" cut square on the ends for a base. NOTE: Bob Beattie e-mailed me to suggest that those using very smooth "Stirrer Sticks" should use steel wool to ruough them up before using them to impart a better texture to the fence. See Below:

"MANUFACTURING BASE" WITH "COFFEE STIRRER" STICKS IN PLACE

I then cut various lengths of the cocktail stick corresponding to shoulder to head height of a 20mm figure.

SHORT LENGTHS OF STIRRER STICK CUT TO VARYING LENGTHS

Using the base  to insure a straight line on the bottom to align the bottom of the fence strakes, I glue(White Glue) the strakes individually with random lengths and at small difference in angle. (If one wants a moer "formal" fence, one could align strakes of equal length more carefully).

Using the base to align the strakes I weight them down until the glue is completely dry.

Next, using one of  the same cocktail sticks, I glue it to the base at a distance from one edge such that there is just enough room for the fence to fit between it and the edge of the base.

Using some kind of support I now glue the completed fence to its base against the supporting cocktail stick.

One should make a few of these wher the fence is longer than the base on one or bothe ends by the length of the base width. This enables the fences to be abutted at right angles without a gap  for enclosures.

Finally I  spray paint the whole piece black, then dry brush in grey ( one could use white, tan, etc whatever fits your terrain). I finish with terraining the base.

THE FINISHED FENCE IN A CHAIN OF COMMAND GAME

MAKING ROADS

This week as many members were away, Dick Messier and I met to build roads. We use the technique discussed by Nikolas Lloyd http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/models/scenery/roads.html. However we use  brown Naugahide (available in many fabric shops) - another Nauga died for the wargaming hobby!

We used 1.5" roads and made about 210" of road plus some radius turns of varying degree, Cross and "T" junctions.



View of ACW game shows what the roads look like when finished.

 We also took photos of all our mountains so as to scale them for use on battle maps. I take a photo of a hill with 2 12" rulers as in the photo. Using Photoshop I then trim the photo so that the  picture is to scale:

Finally, using the "crop" tool, I scale it to 1" as my maps are scaled to 1in. =1 ft. In Quark Express ( a desktop publishing program - There are a lot of desktop  publishing and drawing programs that allow one to draw over photograps and they vould od the same thing.) I draw the contour line which is now to scaled for my maps.



I then color the outline and color the outline in its final color.

Finally I remove the photo and add a number to ID the hill from those in our collection

Every hill we use is so deliniated so that I can "drag" the hill onto a map. Thus a map can be created and we know what exact hill fits in place without having to make up odd size hills. You can see this use in all the scenearios described in this blog.  If you find other publishing programs of drawing progams that will allow this type of manipulation, please let me know and I will list them here.