The start of the big project! - Helms Deep

Well look at this.. two posts in one week!!
hmmm... I wonder how long I'll keep this up for.
:-)

Anyway, I mentioned in my last post that I had started a big new project- exciting stuff huh?!


And so here it is..

Yep, thats right..
Helms deep (i realise you could probably guess from the posts title, but meh).
The basic plan is to make a helms deep gaming board large enough to play War of the ring, lotr sbg and possibly even Warhammer on. This means that it has to be fairly big! After all, recreating the battle of helms deep would be rather underwhelming if it was only just about big enough to hold a few troops- wouldn't it!

In fact the size has to be quite specific, as in order to play war of the ring- a gaming system i've recently started playing alot- the walls, causeway and interior have to be big enough for the company movement trays to fit on/in.

The first thing to do was decide what i'm going to make it out of.
Years ago i actually made a helms deep board using polystyrene, but as i was very young at the time it was abit crap. But i did learn alot about working with polystyrene and its limitations. Although cheap and light it was also very fragile and didn't look very realistic.

So i started looking into alternative materials, such as foam board etc. That's when i stumbled across this stunning helms deep board -->

This beautiful piece of art was made By Onyx and i hope he doesn't mind me posting a picture of it on here without permission but it is so good i just had to upload it.
I will however give him a proper shout out by posting this link to his blog where he explains how he went about building it.
http://onyxworkshop.wordpress.com/about/helms-deep/

The great thing about his blog is that it details the entire build, from start to finish, and therefore practically gives me a step-by-step guild to try and build my own. Onyx's board was built from plaster, cast largely from Hirst arts molds (or is it moulds?). The good thing about Plaster is that its durable, widely available and easy to work with. And casting it using the Hirst Arts molds means that every section is identical, even if i'd have to build it Brick by boring brick. It was at this stage where i couldn't decide whether or not i should cast the bricks using resin or plaster.. resin is lighter and maybe stronger, i don't really know, but i have no experience using it.. whereas I've cast using plaster before- albeit years ago. So after a trip to the local hobby store i decided to sit on the fence and buy resin-plaster :-D (by gedeo if your interested)

Now then, i have no intention of building a carbon copy of onyx's board... As awesome it is, i'd like to put some of my own ideas into it and since i'd specifically like to play war of the ring on it, it'll have to be a bit different anyway.  Not only this, but i want to include my Resin Helms deep gatehouse that i bought from games workshop years and years ago.
 
This will save me all the hassel of having to build my own gatehouse, but does mean that my hornburg will be larger- as the walls curve much more gradually.

The next step was to buy all the molds i would need and the plaster..

Hirst Arts do a fantastic range of molds and although fairly expensive (particularly when considering shipping to the UK) are well worth the money and i highly recommend them. With the price in mind however, i wanted to keep my molds used down to a minimum and so after some careful consideration i chose the four which would be most useful and ordered them.

 


In the picture on the right you can see the molds :-)


They are:
Basic Block Mold #40   
Octagon Tower Mold #63 
8″ Round Tower Mold #64    
Wall Builder Mold #200     




Once i had everything i needed i started casting blocks over the course of the next couple of weeks, whilst experimenting with different ratio's of water vs plaster, to get the strongest cast.

  




Well, thats gonna be about it for now, as it's late, I'm tired and this post is already longer than i had intended anyway. 
 I shall post again either later this week or early next week- I've actually made quite abit of progress with this project already and would like to try and get the blog up to date- Stay tuned and all that jazz.