Leaping Lizards!

This post is the big reveal post.  Here's where we see exactly what the highway of death will look on the table, complete in all its miniature wargaming splendor.  Cars, terrain, the whole shebang.  This is the culmination of weeks of effort.  It's gonna be so satisfying.  It's gonna be great!  It's gonna be...

In the wrong scale.

These car lanes are half as big as they should be.  Way back at the start of this project, I decided to stick with the Division 5 cars.  The problem is that Division 5 cars are rated subcompact, and the 1" wide bases are too small to hold a m1:64 scale How Wheels or Matchbox car.  So I upsized the scale by fifty percent to make it work.  When I started the highways I used the old 1" = 1 lane rule.  

Like an idiot I didn't check the terrain against a reference figure.  I just plowed ahead with base measurements.  When your miniatures don't meet the terrain until two months into the project, you know what you get?  A lot of useless terrain.

The trees and billboards can be salvaged, but the boards themselves?  All that time and effort and paint and static grass (which ain't cheap)?  Wasted.

Maybe I can pawn them off on some sucker at a swap meet.  Anybody know any suckers?

Still In A Box

The addition of 8-square feet of highway terrain requires an upgrade in the box department.  They won't fit in this one:

So we have to move up to one of these.:

The trees and billboards and smoke fit into the metal can in the left. We now have room for even more local kine terrain, too.  Like a shave ice stand or a surf shack or plate lunch wagon.

This time for reals, yo.  Tomorrow we'll totes see what the cars look like wit the new terrain.

Eight Feet of Duelling Ground

Finished!  Using the wrong kind of dip meant this project took twice as long as it should have.  But now, at long last, here's a full eight feet of Hawai'ian roadway just waiting for some auto-duelling mayhem.  Look upon my works ye mighty wargamers and despair:

It's still a bit glossy - I couldn't wait for the dullcoat to dry before showing it off.  Tomorrow I'll put the cars and terrain down on it and see how well it all hangs together.

Quick Update

Quick update for now.  The post-crash Hawaiian highways have some paint back on the ground and some trees based up.  

Nothing fancy.

Not a fan of that greenish plastic for the fronds on the trees, but it'll do for now.

The Grass is Always Greener

That took a lot more static grass than I'd hoped.  Static grass is probably the most expensive part of this terrain, and with all the non-playable surface on these tiles, it took a lot of it.  

Two lane divided highways are possible with this set up,
but only very short ones.  I can only lay two feet of that
much pavement on the table at a time.

Halfway through the landscaping I realized that I did this backwards.  I should have re-painted the stripes in the road before planting the grass.  That stuff sheds off the boards when you don't have a decent varnish coat on top.  And painting the lines is going to mean a lot more handling before the varnish.

Now that's a hair-pinny curve.  "Hair-pinny" is a real world
that I just now made up.

The shoulders look a lot better now, and the random splotches of grass help break up the straight seams between boards.  This might just work out okay after all.

One other mistake hit me while greening up these boards.  The local guys are going to complain that my roads aren't authentic - they don't have nearly enough pot holes in them.  Like parking at college, this is probably a universal complaint, so if you ever make roads and tell people they are the local roads...remember that one.

Back to Square Six

After another fine night of drybrushing, we're almost back to where we were before the varnish.  I'm really not at all happy with the way those shoulders no longer line up, but at this point it's probably not worth the effort to re-do these highways yet again.

Those are some shiny patchwork roads.

Texture close-up.

This was supposed to be a simple step-by-step example of what to do.  It's turned into a step-by-step-by-step example of what not to do.  Hopefully you all can learn from my mistakes.

More Local Kine Terrain

As mentioned previously, these aren't just any roads, they are local kine Hawaiian-style roads.  Red dirt, local signs, and of course, palm trees:

Stolen straight from the kids' dinosaur toy collection.  The gray stuff is kitty litter stuck on with thinned out white glue. With the same color spray paint and drybrushing as the roadway sections, those bases should blend right into the rest of the terrain.

Catch Up Time

It's been a busy weekend what with the stuffing of the face and the last desperate gasp of football before the long dark off-season that doesn't end until last August.  And yet, somehow, I still found time to start fixing last week's horrible mishap with "The Dip".  Nothing a little spray paint and drybrushing and re-lining can't fix.  These probably look familiar, but this is now the second 'base coat' on the off-road sections.

Here's a bonus warning showing spray paint on the
washer and dryer.  My wife would be really annoyed that I
didn't cover my work area better; if she ever used this thing.
HOO-ah!

Interestingly, the pavement actually looks better with the black stain on it.  More like asphalt blacktop and less like concrete.  Guess this mistake can be played off as all part of the plan, after all.