Saturday Workbench

Well, the cotton wool balls soaked in diluted ink didn't work very well - only the outer layers got stained and they took ages to dry. Scratch that idea. However, I have another plan...


I did a little bit of shopping this morning. Here's what I got:

At the back is an A2 magnetic whiteboard (A2 is 420 x 594 mm - the white board surface is slightly smaller than that, but I've still got a usable 16" x 22" area). This will be for my 1X scale arena - there's another pic further down to show you how it will be used. I also got some small magnets and adhesive dots for keeping track of things like speed and handling status during games.

The cushion does serve a purpose - the fibre stuffing may be a better alternative to the cotton wool for smoke and paint markers. I've got a few bits soaking in the ink mix at the moment.

As for the cars, at some point when I wasn't looking they leapt into my basket. I tried to put them back on the shelves, but they started crying so I bought them and brought them home. There are a couple of dune buggies in there for wasteland games or off-road mayhem.

As yesterday was payday, I purchased a few more Car Wars PDFs from E23 Warehouse. A lot of my time this afternoon has been spent printing out some of them, along with some 3X counters that I'd downloaded from the "St Paul's Area Road Knights" website. Now I've just got to cut them all out...

On Thursday night I put the four black Mercs into the stripping jar and had been scrubbing them every so often to remove the paint. The black paint was much tougher to get off these than the other colours were. Today I was happy that I'd got as much off as I could, so they got a quick rinse and were left to dry.

While that was going on, I took the A2 board outside and sprayed it with grey texture paint (having masked the shiny metal surround with electrical tape). I finished off the can - I'll need to get another so that I can do the rest of the MDF bases (I didn't get a chance yesterday at work). Here's how the board looks now, with one of the 1:200 plastic cards to show it is still magnetic:

I will probably do some work on it at some point to create some colour variation and maybe add some ground markings.

This evening I've been working on the Mercs. After a look at the cars to see where weapons could be mounted I drilled holes where required and prepped the weapons. I then gave the car shells a going over with sandpaper to roughen the surface a little to help key them for priming (see - I did remember!).

I then glued the weapons in place. While I had the superglue out, I fixed the wheels to the chassis.

I'll be setting up the spray booth and airbrushing kit after this post, ready to go tomorrow. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll have them finished.