Esquimalt Thunderdome – a Gaslands race track

I love a big terrain project and a few of us here got into Gaslands recently. So I decided to create a racetrack. A big one, at 5′ by 3′. So off I set to do that.

Initially, I wanted it to be portable, so I did some experiments and found that acrylic caulk will peel off of wax paper. I ended up regretting this decision, but I am going to use the technique for a future project.

Racetrack laid out on wax paper
Racetrack laid out on wax paper

The track is 36′ wide and 60′ long, with the track itself being 8′ wide. All of these widths are approximate. The cars on the track are either older Hot Wheels or Lledo.

Once the caulk was added, I added quite a bit of texture with a rough caulk knife that I had roughed up on a previous project (oops). Here was another error I made – the wax paper was not fully taped in the middle, I ended up with ridges.

Fresh caulk on the racetrack
Fresh caulk on the racetrack

One note about drying acrylic – it loses a lot of water, so you’ll want something underneath your mat like another drop cloth to catch that water.

Once dry, I inked it using and then heavily dry brushed it with a variety of browns. Overall it works, but I was aiming for a slightly different brown than what I ended up with.

Painted race track
Painted race track

We used it a few times like this, but it really didn’t work that well. The edges of the mat were thin and a tear started developing in one curve. So onto a canvas mat it went, with more acrylic caulk to stick it down. Should have done that first…

Now that it had a permanent home, I decided to add some concrete pads with thicker grey caulk, mostly as an experiment. It worked well, I would do this again.

Then it was time to flock the rest of the mat. I decided a dead grass theme fit the post-apocalyptic Gaslands well. The dog decided to come and leave his mark on the mat (good thing acrylic caulk is non toxic, as it ended up on his pads too). And thus Crater Dog Paw 1 came to be.

Once the mat was fully flocked, it looks pretty good. This is the 85% stage done project – I need to cut the mat down to size and paint the concrete pads. I may also add some more bushes or other flock.

Links of Interest, 30 September 2020

Busy month but not much gaming activity of any sort!

Over on the awesome Lead Adventure Forum, Silent Invader discussed a really neat Snakes-and-Ladders inspired English Civil War mini-campaign idea, which seems readily adaptable to all sorts of other times and places! He later found his original inspiration, a post over on Grid Wargaming from June of this year which used the idea for a Jacobite campaign and has some additional details. One nice thing in our current age of physical distancing and social isolation is that the campaign part can basically be run solo thanks to the “gameboard”…

On another genre entirely, I recently tripped over the Wartime Canada website and have only just started exploring it; they have a small but interesting selection of WW1 troop manuals available for download.

I’ve got a bunch of fantasy terrain on the go I want to get finished, photographed, and posted this weekend, so hopefully October will be a bit busier around here than September wound up being!

Links of Interest, 4 Sept 2020

Quiet around here for the last couple weeks on account of me being busy getting married and going off on a short honeymoon, as well as various wedding planning/bachelor party type stuff before the actual wedding!

Back now, working on various things that I’ll show off here in due course.

Firepower Gaming is a new UK website & webstore that is publishing some great terrain articles. They started with a fantastic set of Normandy farm buildings, starting from simple MDF kits and really, really making them shine and have since published scratchbuilding a stone dovecote to accompany the other Normandy buildings. I built an English-style dovecote a few years ago and they’re great wargaming scenery, small footprint but visually interesting. No idea how common they were outside of England and France, mind you.

I’ve also just received my first ever order from Shapeways of a mix of stuff, including a bunch of incredibly detailed 1/1200 or 1/1250 detail items for our naval games. That Shapeways link above goes to my public lists, so you can see some of what I ordered. I’ll do up a review of those sometime soon too.