12. Curb your enthusiasm - Building a Gaming Board. Part 3

Yup. Late update? As expected.

TO BOARD!

  I do believe we are back to the research/theory phase.
This pretty much focuses on the part that are to be added to the road pieces of the board. The blank squares take care of themselves.
So, to make this easier to follow we'll have a 'Theory' and 'Practise' section for each detail.

First off...

Curbs.
Theory:

After having a walk around the area I live; risking looking like a mentally deranged person, I set about measuring the curb slabs.
I found they were roughly 3ft long.
This is roughly half the height of an average human male (I am 6ft 2/3).
So, the height of the 'staple' figure of Warhammer 40k, the space marine, is roughly 3cm.
Half of the space marines height is roughly 1.5 cm.
The curb for my roads would be 1.5 cm each.

A square tile is 24 inches long, or roughly 60.96 cm. To make it easier round it down to 60cm.
60 divided by 1.5 = 40. This is the number of slabs per side of the road.
To fully fit out a road this number needs to be multiplied by two, which brings us to 80 curb slabs per straight road square.
As I have two of these pieces, the total curb slabs I'd need thus far would be 160.

There is also the issue of the curved road square.
The way to do this is ignore the curve for now and concentrate on the straight sections of this square.
There are two long, and two short straights.
2 long = 14 1/2 inch = 36.88 (rounded to 36) x 2 = 72/1.5 = 48
2 short = 9 1/2 inch = 24.13 (rounded to 24) x 2 = 48/1.5 = 32
This brings us to a total of 80 slabs for the square, and 240 for the board.

Practise.
The first hurdle is what material to use?
I opted for tea stirrers/lolly pop sticks.



Seriously. Cheap and easy to get hold of!
You can realistically get 8 slabs out of a stirrer; 240/8 = 30 stirrers. McDonalds, you had it coming .



So lets test this yeah?




Nice!
A point I should bring up, when placing the slabs there will, inevitably, be a little bit of a gap; so 2 slabs side by side will probably take more space than the 3 cm total than they should. This is why I rounded down initially. However, it may turn out that a couple of slabs might have to be cut down/not use the full 40 per side.

Anyway, ONWARD!

Cut out the slabs...



And glue them down



Make sure to keep them straight as you go along...



And Voila!



Straight road done. Do this for all your straight roads... I know it is tedious as hell, but hey! I think it looks pretty good, and is pretty cheap to do.

That brings me on to the curved curb slabs.
This is far more difficult. in theory it should maintain similarity with the 1.5 curbs.
However in practise it wasn't that simple.

The first thing to do is, on a piece of plasticard, draw out the larger curve section, using the same method you did for the actual curve in the road (A spray paint lid, remember ).



It should look something like that.
Now, file it/cut it down to the correct width and cut it into pieces (about four).
Use these pieces to trace/cast another set for the inner curve (You'll only need three).

It should look something like this:

Outer curve




Inner curve (I apologise about the blurriness).



And that is it! Curbs done!


That'll do for updates about the board for now... it is a lot of text, and not overly exciting to look at.
But what is that white stuff you ask? Tough! You'll have to wait for the next update... well, a couple of updates. Next gaming board update shall be board features: theory and practise again.

But I'll post a few actual models in between now and then. I KNOW RIGHT!?!?

Comments, and criticism more than welcome.

-DtotheH-