Waterloo 2015

With the 200 year anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo this year our 28mm Napoleonics group are looking at a 4 day battle to commemorate the event.

So lets take a look at the board we will be making for the battle.

Firstly it will need to be big enough to fit on our table of 12 feet by 6 feet at a height of 10cm at the the British and French ridge lines.  This would be an expensive build if we used Extruded foam I build the Salamanca project with.  So it was time to find a cheaper material.

Enter KoolFoam who provided a quote for the material I would need (approx 36 feet by 2 feet of foam) for just a little more than $160.  They were able to provide the material at the measures I asked for.  I broke down the table into 2 feet wide panels at 50cm thick to assist in mobility.

Lets start the build.

We first laid out the foam panels to form up the British lines.  Marking a 1 foot grid over the board to help trace out our contours.

First Contour

Second Contour

Once in place we worked off the plan to mark the high line and the low line of each contour.  This is the plan we worked to provided by our groups Map guru.  That said we didn't want to cover the field in 5 layers of contours and so we did have to cut down the design to a build that would allow for a good battle rather than an accurate depiction of the field.

Using just a normal 2B pencil we shaded the contour and started to cut the shapes.

Then placing the contour on the low contour we traced the shape, this provided us with the mark for the low slopes to meet.  

Moving the edge which would be centre field over the table lip so we could cut it all in one pass (or as much as we can)

It was at this point that we counted the number of 1 foot squares on the boards and realised we were missing a few feet.  This was due to a design decision we made in the start of the project.  A quick addition to the British left flank and we are sorted, there is also a panel on the right that is not shown below.

With the important British ridge shaped we started on the French (less important) ridge.

When we finished it I measured and marked a 12 by 6 with chalk on the floor, and pieced both sides with in it.

The spare piece on the British side is so we have somewhere to place our cups of tea.  

The blue foam is a cut off from my Salamanca project to mark the lesser ridge used by the French Grand Battery.  It was lower then the main French ridge and this foam being 25mm was perfect for this.  This piece is the only one we have cut the slope on, the rest will be worked on next weekend.

Oh and we picked up some Faux Fur to help with some coverage, just for giggles I through it over the boards..... what do you think.

More to follow....