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| One completed tile with one set of magnets glued in the right way round! |
First off, being inspired by some thoughts about terrain (and watching some Mal the Terrain Tutor and Luke's APS videos while sneezing), I dug out the rather heavy box of MDF that's sitting on my bottom shelf that contains the result of a KS pledge for the Sally 4th Terra-formers terrain tiles. They've been on the 'been meaning to do something with this for a while' pile, and as I'm kind of on a terrain-building roll when not writing Dux stuff at present, I figured I should at least check out what I pledged :D
Answer: 33 assorted 1' square terrain frames (one 6'x4' board plus 9 extra). Essentially, for those who missed the KS, they're MDF modular frames into which you insert a 12' square of expanded or extruded polystyrene, and they're held together by magnets. Ash and Pippa down the club have some as well, so I assembled one enough to take it down the club and check we both had the magnets round the right way - now we do.
The annoying thing is they're not *quite* compatible with the Omaha Beach boards, which would be really cool as we have a lot of those boards which are essentially big flat 2' (ish) squares. The Omaha boards are blue craft foam, which ships in 600mm square sheets (hence the 'ish'!). Sally 4th chose to go imperial, and the outside dimensions of the tiles are 305mm (i.e. 1'), hence two Terra-former tiles are about 1cm longer than one of mine. They are the same height as near as makes no mind, though (as they're essentially 2"/50mm foam on 3mm board).
I had a cunning plan to rebate a strip of MDF into the sides of the Omaha tiles to fit Terra-former compatible magnets, but it seems to do this properly and make all the tiles accurate multiples of 1' square we'd need to box in the Omaha tiles in 5mm MDF and fill and flock the resulting edges. Since I have a plan afoot to do some more grass work the boards (yes, again: I'm not happy with the rather 'patchy' look), I may consider this - also, they currently have no edge protection and are getting a bit battered (and as a result you can see the board joins a lot more than I'd like).
Side note: There would be an alternative option to drop most of the Omaha tiles into Terra-formers' own 24" square frames, but they're 20 quid EACH (ouch) and I have 17 tiles (ok, 10 complete and 7 partial, not counting the actual beaches) that would need doing, and some would need cutting about to match our modular hill geometry! Getting a whole bunch (64) of 610mm x 50 mm strips of 5mm MDF cut off a sheet or two would be far cheaper, in the absence of a Sally 4th sponsorship deal, or a lottery win, or a bonus (fat chance of the latter with my employer) :D
...oh, and my WarWorld Scenics flock order arrives today.
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