Time for a little change

Well painting has stalled a little on the Finns, this is for a couple of reasons. First painting all that white does your head in, starting to see white..

The other is related to another project, well been talking to one of my fellow wargamers and sparked my interest back into my 6mm ACW. One thing that was really common in the ACW period was all of those snake rail fences, and one of the most disappointing things is trying to find some nice ones in 6mm

Don't get me wrong, there are fences out there but I am a fussy bugger when it comes to models and now I have started to look at buying terrain. I have looked at two Snake fences and they just don't scream buy me.

So I figure I would give it a crack to make some of my own, now a few things that spring to mind is the railings. Every material that I have looked at is just too large for the application. After chatting to my hobby supplier he showed me:

For those who are not sure what this is. It's a Master Airscrew MA4000 Balsa Stripper

Interesting I thought, and well I bought it. After understanding how it worked I went to testing it on some balsa wood. Setting the width of the cut to 1mm, I sliced a strip off a 1.5mm thick sheet. Looking at it I then sliced it on the opposite side (flipped it on its side) and repeated.

This has been the best buy for a long time, took me 20 minutes to cut the base, cut the strips to 25mm and then assembled. (Will post some photos tomorrow) Really impressed with this tool.

I have decided to reduce the size of the pieces to 20mm and sharpen the angles to get a better zigzag look to the fence.

The plan is to cut up all of the bases and apply a light coat of sand, paint them all up including grass ect then build the fence on top. The reason for this is that the fence is 3 rails high and applying sand once the wood was attached covered the first rail. Also I will be painting all of the strips before cutting them into the 20mm section and touching up the ends.

So prep time will be a bit, but once all of the prep has been done, assembly should be fast. I will be logging the progress on the blog.

So how much fence, well this I am not sure on. Enough to cover a 6'x4' table.

As with all wargamers, got more than one project on the run and its always nice to take a break from one when you are finding the task tedious.

Well onto the prep work