DIY Airbrush Booth (Under $50 US)

 I finally cleaned up my hobby space.  That effort deserves a blog post all its own, maybe later, but now that the room is actually usable again I'm eager to return to a number of projects.  Since most of these projects require painting, it was a perfect opportunity to revisit my airbrush setup.

I never took a picture of my old airbrush arrangement but it wouldn't be hard to recreate.  Basically I wedged a 20 inch box fan into the open window, and sprayed directly into an HVAC air filter suspended by the airflow against the fan.  Based on the spray residue captured on the filter, the system worked but was as awkward as it sounds.  I decided therefore to make an actual booth, trying to keep it cheap while achieving good containment and integral lighting.

A few years ago, the Missus was throwing out two perfectly good lampshades, which I saved from the trash since their shape screamed "spray booth".  The initial idea was that the two shades would be nested inside each other, with the inner shade acting as a spray shield and light diffuser for the outer shade, which would act as the air tunnel and light mount.

Searching online I found an eight inch diameter, 420 cubic foot per minute flow duct fan, wired for 110V AC, at one of the big box home improvement stores.  Since it wasn't in stock I had to have it shipped to the store; the small nine inch cube-shaped box it came in turned out to be the perfect interface for the square frustum lampshades.

I purchased a string of cuttable LED lights online, the type with self-adhesive backing.  I assumed these were far more flexible than they turned out to be.  While I originally envisioned nearly covering the inside of the outer shade with LED strip lights, I could not bend the strip aggressively enough and therefore only used less than two of 16 feet of lights.

A simple cardboard sleeve acts as the air duct directing the fan exhaust out the window.  The window interface is a large piece of sandwiched corrugated cardboard; the cardboard sits wedged by the upper window and provides a shelf to support the air duct weight.

The original lampshade material proved too opaque for the LED strips, even at full brightness, so I tore it away and replaced it with cling-wrap, Dexter-style.  Obviously the intent here is disposability and easy replacement of the spray shield once it gets too contaminated with paint.  The LEDs feature an integral dimmer switch so I can reduce the intensity if necessary.

I accomplished a smoke test and the booth performed wonderfully.  Even with the filter (cut from a HEPA filter) the fan provides plenty of air movement and should direct any atomized paint overspray away from me.  As the pictures show, the booth offers plenty of light.  The booth's 14 inch edges give a pretty roomy spray area sufficient for nearly anything I want to spray, even terrain.

[Here is where I tried to upload the smoke test video but, you know, it's Blogger.  Worthless]

Lame screen cap because Blogger sucks

Breaks into four pieces that fit under desk

Although the booth hasn't seen any real airbrush use yet, I'm happy and confident with the build.  It needs some refinement, sealing the window interface connections, for example.  Still, the price is especially nice.

I paid $28 US for the fan, and $17 US for the light strip, recycling every other component from either trash or my bits boxes.  So, $45 US for the booth which is about 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the small table-top ones online.

Honestly, I should've eschewed the LED strip and made the cost even less.  I had forgotten the hundreds of 3V individual LEDs I have in a random drawer.  Wiring up ten of these to a 32V power adaptor would've been trivial and probably offered similar intensity light with a better area distribution.  Oh well, lessons learned.     

"There it is"..not sure why I'm pointing.  Nice light though.

Tabletop Wargame Building Scale: Figure or Ground?

Subtitle: 

...or neither?

FASA's Battletech wins the honor of being my first tabletop wargame but we only played with paper markers (were they stand-ups or chits? I honestly don't remember). My junior-high chums and I soon discovered proper miniatures wargaming with Rogue Trader and with it the curious difference between ground and figure scales.

Despite our dutiful reading of Mr. Priestly's every word, we accepted that the ground scale compressed greatly compared to the (back-then) 28mm figures, but we failed to similarly compress the dimensions of our terrain features. Of course, those were the days of seemingly limitless free-time and negligible responsibilities, giving us ample opportunity to construct 3 to 4 meter (!) game boards that wouldn't be dominated by our figure-scale buildings.

Returning to wargaming in my time- and space-poor adult days I discovered that figure-scale buildings seemed massively bloated on my typical meter-square battle mat. I chalked this up to the 28mm scale; in fact, avoiding this apparent "parking-lot battle" spurred me to explore 10mm and 6mm figure scales.

Looks great but too big???

Preparing for a 10mm campaign saw me scratchbuild some 10mm buildings, true to figure dimensions, which I've only now started painting. Looking for a paint scheme, I popped on over to the Pendraken site, since I'm using their figures and hoped to find some in-progress game pictures featuring both buildings and troopers. Instead of those I found the dimensions of their buildings, immediately noticing their two-story layout measures maybe 2/3 of my two-story farmhouse, proportionally.

I double-checked my math and found no errors, leading me to look to the internet for answers. Mel, the Terrain Tutor, came through like he always does. In the linked video he explains how most commercial wargaming buildings are scaled down proportionally to the figures, except for the doors and windows which remain figure-scale to produce the illusion of matched size. The doors and windows, of course, brilliant!

Further internet rabbit-holes, mainly discussion boards, suggested that many wargamers match their scratchbuilt structure proportions to the ground scale. That left me wandering: do the commercial manufacturers use an intermediate building scale, between ground and figure? Perhaps 2/3 of figure scale for the buildings and trees, and 1/3 figure scale for board size?

I'm not sure of the answer but I've decided to try it out for myself. In the coming months, when I finally get all my terrain done and figures painted, I plan to repeat a platoon vs. platoon 10mm game (one figure = one trooper), playing it once with my figure-scale scratchbuild farmhouse, and then again with another scratchbuild sized to Pendraken's offerings.

Figure scale (left) and "commercial scale" (right) scratch builds

I'm not done with the smaller farmhouse yet but I've blocked out the basic shape in polymer clay and included a comparison pic with my (primed but unpainted) figure-scale farmhouse. It'll take a full game with other terrain and figures to determine exactly which one "feels" right. 

DIY Trees and Flock

Covered with DIY Flock

I still have my moon table set up for playtesting my future tank game (last post) but most of my wargaming effort right now lies in getting a 10mm Cold War-gone-hot scenario going.

Years ago I bought some beautiful Pendraken 10mm figures, specifically Argentinians from the Falklands War range, to represent late 1950s-early 1960s U.S. Army.  The project stalled however because I couldn't find a suitable proxy for Soviet forces of the same era.  Pendraken suddenly revived my project by recently producing a range of Cold War Soviets, which of course I snapped up.

I plan on using Ganesha Games' Flying Lead rules, with a fire team (represented by two bases) activating in the place of a single figure (as the assumed scale is 28mm).

Still need to paint and flock bases

I needed terrain, specifically trees, for the 10mm game so over the last months I've been twisting up wire and coming up with a way to make my own flock.  Like nearly all of my methods it's super time-consuming and requires some dedicated (but common) tools.  The results have blown me away however and the best part is the raw material (recycled paper) is totally free and abundant.

FREE!!! (Except for the time...)

 

Tracks Turrets & Tokamaks: Playtest (in progress)

I set the moon table back up last weekend, in order to finally test my rules for future tanks, Tracks Turrets & Tokamaks (TTT). I intended to test the rules last August, after making a terrain mat but that stalled. Although I didn't expect 10 months to pass between another attempt, I took advantage of the time and doubled my number of lunar scatter terrain pieces. More significantly, I've redesigned the rules for the third time.

I've sought a set of solitaire tank miniature rules ever since completing my first future tank sculpts (10 years ago now!). TTT started as a modification of Andrea Sfiligoi's Song of Blades and Heroes (SoBaH) family of games, since those wonderful rules work very well for solo. The modifications became so extensive however that I decided to just create a solo tank game from the ground up. Still, TTT's origin as a SoBaH hack shows in its use of activation dice, although I shifted to d10s.

The genius of Andrea's SoBaH activation mechanic lies in its "press-your-luck" aspect, where the player has to decide between retaining the initiative by acting conservatively, or potentially losing initiative while attempting a decisive action. Unfortunately, the brilliance of this mechanism dims a bit in solo play, as the solitaire player always knows just how aggressive or conservative the "other" side will be.

My solution for using activation dice in solo play involves playing cards. The suit (color really, red or black) indicates which side activates, while the number value indicates the amount of information available to the activating unit, which in turn influences the effectiveness of the activation. Face cards represent either support element activation or exceptionally precise/accurate information and therefore offer even more player decisions. So in my system I've unfortunately lost the "gamble for initiative" aspect but at least preserved the unpredictability of who's going next.

The activation rules have weathered three iterations of rewrites, essentially unchanged, while I've extensively tinkered with movement and shooting. Originally the game featured move distances read directly from the activation dice, requiring a lot of tape measure use. I returned the game to its SoBaH roots, opting instead to sacrifice a little tank-design individuality in favor of movement bands.

Quick Reference Sheet

I decided to incorporate the movement bands into the design of a quick reference sheet (QRS), instead of creating movement sticks. The resulting size of the QRS gave me a lot of real estate to put nearly all of the required tables on one side, leaving the other side blank for unit rosters. The QRS' most notable feature, the 33mm hole, allows the player to extract information from a die face's position.

I stole the idea of getting information from dice face position from Joe McCullough, the designer of the popular Rangers of Shadowdeep and Frostgrave games. I've never played any of Joe's games but I heard him talking with Matt over on my favorite podcast, Bedroom Battlefields Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast. On that episode, Mr. McCullough mentioned his brilliant realization that the triangular faces of an icosahedron come up pointing in a random direction with each roll; the die face therefore acts as a perfect indicator (in his games) of random scatter direction. I realized that with a template this idea could be extended to other information, with the die indicating a wide variety of results ouija board-style.

Representing technological warfare on the tabletop requires accounting for a lot of different factors: target signature, shooter tracking ability, countermeasures, counter-countermeasures, weapon/armor interaction, etc. I wanted to incorporate as many of these factors into the shooting mechanic as possible without being bogged down by cumbersome matrices with tiny type, tons of on-board markers, or a list of endless modifiers. And I wanted shooting resolution to avoid a time-consuming multi-layered approach, i.e. "roll to lock-on, now roll to hit, now roll to penetrate, now roll to save". Originally I tackled this problem by using dice colors and sums, allowing the dice results to do double and triple duty in a single roll. For example, in a previous rules iteration, each individual die result indicated potential damage, while the sum of the values on two of these same dice (sharing a discrete color) indicated potential ammo exhaustion. The problem with this approach was that the results, while supposedly representing disparate factors, were coupled. The QRS template versus die face method beautifully decouples the factors, while allowing me to keep it to just one attack roll.

The playtest scenario was a straight skirmish, with each side starting with 3 tanks on the board and 3 in reserve. The session's yielded a lot of insight, even though I'm still only in the opening phases. Things I've learned already:

    - The QRS works well; it's large enough to write on but small enough not to be obtrustive, even with one per platoon.

    - I've fallen out of love with on-table tokens. Originally I planned to track all sorts of tank statuses though tokens. Sounded good on paper but as soon as I saw how cluttered the board was, I ditched that idea for paper recordkeeping.

    - Don't design during playtest! I kept coming up with new rules, and immediately implemented them, during play. Very quickly this led to confusion. A great lesson-learned for me was "design-playtest-iterate" not "playtest-iterate-playtest"

    - The game moves fast. I've only drawn maybe twenty cards and already one side has lost a tank while the other side has suffered heavy damage in one. While I'm trying to avoid the "fight in a parking lot" feel, initial results indicate at least 5 v 5 would be a better lineup.

    - I need an objective-based scenario. Two opposing forces employing sound tactics simply results in an inevitable stalemate, with reckless action needed to inject some interest in the fight. Hopefully support elements will also force action but I've yet to activate any!

Table-Top Terrain: Warp-free Bases

Looking to revitalize the old blog, as I haven't posted in over 9 months. I'm on the final push to finish a late in life (and unnecessary) master's degree so I haven't had much time for anything except school and work, let alone gaming. I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel though and perhaps that's why I've felt a resurgance of hobby interest recently.


I've also been contemplating on the fact that I'm not the only busy person out there, and plenty of folks seem to do a fair amount of hobbying despite adult-life commitments. I've been wondering if hobbies, like most pursuits, exist in a feedback loop, and that maybe I can keep the hobby interest up by dabbling in a small amount of constant exposure instead of focusing on large but infrequent events. To that end, I've been making terrain for 10mm games and thought I'd share a bit here.


OK, on to the topic of the post. Since I plan to play some games at the smaller scales, I've been making terrain with thin bases. Listening to wargaming podcasts and reading blogs, it seems a common complaint are terrain bases, especially thin ones, that warp. The picture above shows one of my very thin bases, free of warping. 

  

Replicating this result requires five items: Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty, wood glue, fiberglass wall repair tape, wax paper, and scrap plastic food packaging. The wood glue should not be water resistant but water soluable so it can be thinned; Elmers Interior Wood Glue is the best and any form of TiteBond or Gorilla Glue are absolute no-gos. Any sort of moisture-proof substrate (aluminum foil for example) can be substituted for the scrap plastic but I find the plastic easy to work with and plentiful, with PETE plastic (#1) my preferred variety.

Tools required are scissors, a Sharpee or similar alcohol marker, spreading utensils (I use disposable cutlery from the office kitchen), and a spray-bottle or similar method of adding controlled amounts of water. Masking tape, push-pins, or staples help for step four below.




Step one: cut your plastic into the desired shape for the terrain footprint, making sure it's big enough for whatever trees or buildings or whatnot you plan to mount on it. I find an old pair of normal stationary scissors cuts through thin PETE packaging just fine.

Step two: rough-up the surface of one side of each plastic base with some 60-grit sandpaper, giving it enough tooth for the fiberglass tape and putty that comes later.

Step three: use the Sharpee to write some sort of key marker on the base, like a number or letter with an arrow associated with one edge.

Repeat steps one through three for as many terrain pieces required.

***EDIT (27 May 2023): See my reply to Shaun's comment below for adjustments I've already made to the process.  I'm preserving the original post as written but it turns out one can neglect the scrap plastic and skip steps one through three, starting on step four and free-handing the outlines.  This also prevents a lot of the fiberglass tape waste and eliminates the need to label the outlines.***

Step four: Tape down (or otherwise secure) a few pieces of wax paper, giving sufficient area to accomodate all your plastic bases. One by one, trace the outline of each terrain base on the wax paper with the Sharpee, ensuring to duplicate the respective key marker on the wax paper, in the proper orientation.

Step five: apply the fiberglass tape to the wax paper, covering each terrain base outline. Since the wall repair tape is probably the most expensive material, draw the outlines in step four to minimize waste due to excess space, but ensure enough room to work on the sheet.

Step six: cut out each terrain shape from the wax paper, cutting the fibreglass tape along with it. Ensure you cut 1 mm to 2 mm inside the marker outline, so as to create a slightly smaller shape than the original plastic base. You have now essentially created peel-off fiberglass tape stickers corresponding to each of your plastic bases.

Step seven: peel and apply each fiberglass tape sticker to the rough side of its respective matching plastic base. Utilize the marker keys to ensure correct orientation.

Step eight: mix up a small amount of putty, sufficient for one terrain base. Roughly estimate the amount of wood glue required to completely coat your terrain piece in a thin (~0.5 mm) layer, add this to your mixing container to start. Sprinkle in the Durham's, mixing until the consistency goes from honey (i.e. the wood glue alone), to a thick, chalky peanut-butter like texture. Next, add small amounts of water until the honey-like consistency returns. You should be able to pour the mixture but just barely.

Step nine: Spread this mixture evenly over your terrain base. Ideally the fibreglass tape should not show through but as this is only the structural foundation layer, in most cases this is OK, as more material will be added later.

Repeat steps eight and nine for all the terrain pieces, leaving them at least 8 but preferably 24 hours to cure before continuing.

Step ten: decorate each base as desired.

The great thing about this technique is that fresh wood glue clings instantly to the cured putty mixture making up the base. In the example picture to the left, the top beauty layer consisted of a mix of old housepaint, acrylic craft paint, wood glue, flour, sand, bentonite clay, and water to improve spreadability. I slathered this goop onto the base and in maybe 2-4 hours it was plastic-like and hard, free of warping yet easily paintable with another layer of housepaint.

I could just cut thin MDF pieces like everyone else but I enjoy this method for the ease of decorating noted above, as well as the ability to use simple scissors to cut complex terrain footprints.