The Port of Gierburg - Part 5: Dock Section II Ground Level Painted

In the previous installment of my Port of Gierburg project I described how I built the base board for my dock section. Now that part is finally finished.

Section I, the Water board and Section II set up together

Wow, time sure flies. And, wow, am I good at procrastinating. I posted part 4 of my Port of Gierburg project log in September 2014! I really had a tough time deciding how to continue with this part of my board. I have made some progress since then and decided that the other buildings and raised level section will be a single removable piece. This meant that I could move on and just paint the board section as it was.

The Port of Gierburg - Part 4: Dock Section II Ground Level WIP

After completing the first section of my Port of Gierburg gaming table it is time to start with the second module. This one will be a lot more difficult and a lot more exciting. Due to its complexity I will handle the (under)ground level first and then tend to the rest later.

Similar to the first module this one is based on a solid 5mm MDF board. Following my initial plans (see Part 1) it measures 45cm x 72cm.

The concept for the port modules with two dock sections encapsulating a water board

The Port of Gierburg - Part 3: Dock Section I Painted & Extras

In the previous instalment I described the building process of the first dock section for my Port of Gierburg project. Today I am going to show the finished piece, give a few painting hints and discuss extra pieces.

Painting the dock section

Painting the dock section was pretty straight forward and similar to my last stoneworks on the Town House and House Fronts. It's all about applying different greys (with brown, black and "bone") and some green and brown washes and pigments. I really enjoy painting stonework because you can get "all dirty", try out a lot of things and rarely do anything wrong in the process.

The main colours I used are Vallejo's Sand Light, Flat Earth and Neutral Grey from the Model Color range, plus a bottle of cheap black that I have been using for years. Mixing these colours basically gives you all you need. For the finishing touches I used watered down dark green and Devlan Mud (from Games Workshop).

I am very happy with the plaster cobblestones from Vampisol: they paint up rather nicely and look great as a large area. As usual I spent a lot of time painting individual stones which is the key to the effect.

Top view of the cobblestone from Vampisol

Trade Goods

The nicest half-timbered house is still just a boring sight when placed on an empty board all by itself. Adding bits such as barrels, crates and sacks to the gaming board goes a long way in making the table more interesting.

For habour scenes Ainsty Castings has a variety of very nice scenery items in their Tade Goods range.

Trade goods from Ainsty Castings

Similar items are available from Tabletop-Art: I bought the Stacked boxes and barrels set 2.

Stacked boxes and barrels set from Tabletop-Art

Compared to the Ainsty bits the Tabletop-Art pieces are much smaller. Especially the barrel stack (see photo, in the middle) appears somewhat tiny, although it is of course perfectly legitimate to have smaller barrels than the average 28mm scenery (funnily, the set is explicitly tagged as 30mm scale).

From the rabble-rousing leader of the Gierburg peasants I had a few MaxMini.eu crates left that I painted up.

A bunch of crates from MaxMini.eu

Now while I'm at it, I might as well mention the other products I either use or plan on purchasing:

• Crates and sacks from Antenocitis Workshop (see here)
• Barrels and crates from Pardulon (see here again)
• Crates, corn sacks and barrels from Stronghold Terrain (see sacks here)
• Groceries and Supplies from Tabletop World
• Rope coils from Black Cat Bases (among a lot of other things)
• Ship's Kit (GOW-SA001) and Small AnchorS (GOW-SA006) from Games of War's Pirate Supplies range

Animals

Lastly, I finally used a cat and a mouse from the Dog, Cats, Mice (ACK011) set by Mirliton (see: Historical 25-28mm > Medieval > Accessories). I really like this set a lot with its characterful animals and highly recommend it.

Stronghold Terrain also has an animal set and I will definately want to add that to my collection of beastly citizens of Gierburg.

Scratch-built jetty

I extended the built-in GrandManner jetty by scratch-building a similar piece. Bascially it is the same thing as the gallows I did years ago, comprising of many coffee stirring sticks.

First, I build a frame for the jetty. The length was chosen to accommodate the Ainsty ships.

The construction is rather simple but took me pretty long to build nonetheless. The jetty consists of 88 coffee sticks cut to length. To give wood constructions like this a finely detailed look I find it important to do some work on the wooden bars. I filed the edges of each stick to give them an irregular cut-to-size appearance.

After glueing the sticks on the frame I used the spike of a compass to poke two holes near the end of each bar to give the impression of nail holes.

From the GrandManner harbour kit I had six bollards left (two per kit) that I could use for this large jetty. The bollards come with small slits meant for the GrandManner resin jetty piece's overlapping bars. I filled them with putty and then glued them to my jetty.

Painting was the usual drybrushing job with browns, greys and bone white.

The finished dock section

Now finally for some photos of the finished piece:

I set up the board with ships (the Old Glory Brigantine and Games of War's Sea Dog and two Sea Pup tenders) and buildings (fronts and Town House). Figures are Gierburg Peasants and Bounty Hunters painted by Simon Bradley.

Up next: Part 4: Dock Section II

The Port of Gierburg - Part 2: Dock Section I WIP

In the second part of this series I describe the building of the first big dock section for the Port of Gierburg gaming table.

Building the Docks

With the water board finished work on the Port of Gierburg continues with the first dock section. Basically this section will consist of three sets of harbour walls from GrandManner that I bought some time ago. Each set consists of various resin parts: a wall piece, a jetty, stairs and a flagstone board.

The Harbour wall/jetty
from the GrandManner online store (ME64)

Following my plans for the port set-up (see Part 1) the first dock section measures 75 x 12 cm. The harbour walls have a width of 31 cm so I had to do some filing to get them in the right sizes. Unfortunately (in this case!) the resin that GrandManner uses to cast their pieces is rock solid so it took me really long to file through the walls.

The plan was to incorporate two stairs and one jetty into the dock. I filed off the lower steps of the stairs so that they would fit nicely next to the jetty. The jetty also had to be cut to size. I could have used the jetty in full length, of course, but I want to be able to place three ships in the port and I have certain plans for additional jetties. This required the jetty section here to be rather short.

Like with the water board I used a 5 mm MDF board as a base. The rest was a lot of styrofoam.

I glued a beech moulding strip to the bottom where the dock would touch the water board. To stabilize the sides and to prevent them from damage I used thin wood boards.

I filed the corners of the wood boards so that they matched the stonework pattern of the harbour walls. Later, I would use modelling putty to fill the gaps and create a smooth surface.


Instead of the flagstone boards that come with the harbour walls I decided to use cobblestone boards from Vampisol. As I described in an earlier review these are very nice plaster boards that I highly recommend. I chose to use them over the resin flagstone pieces because the thin plaster boards can be easily cut into shapes so that they can be combined to create a big seamless surface.

Plaster boards with stretcher bond pattern from Vampisol

The Vampisol boards come with an extra pack of plaster powder to fill any remaining gaps after gluing the boards next to each other. I used both the plaster and fine sand to fill the gaps. I also placed some sand on various spots on the overall surface for a more realistic and less clean look. The last thing was to model the corners of the stonework and a step on each of the two stairs with modelling putty.

My focus during the entire process, or let's call it the "big goal", was to create one big piece that looks and feels like one coherent piece of terrain. I really don't like how terrain built with HirstArts products always looks like assembled Lego bricks. So it was important to me that the various walls, stairs, jetty and cobblestone boards all contributed to the appearance of one sensible piece of terrain.

The dock section in its entirety before undercoating

Lessons learned

It is important to put some heavy books on the sheets of styrofoam every time you apply the white glue. There was one moment - after I had already glued a few layers of styrofoam - where the entire thing started to bend heavily. I immediately placed my standard pile of books on it. At that point I had thought that the piece was sufficiently stabilized since there were already various layers, but, no, it bent. Luckily I noticed this in time and when the white glue was fully dried the docks were straight again. Still, don't trust these materials! All in all it took extremely long with daily cutting and gluing and nightly drying.

I also learned that it is impossible to build an accurate "block" by gluing sheets of styrofoam on top of each other. After a few layers you're always off by a few millimeters and I don't get better. For the second dock section - which will be a lot bigger too - I will use not only an MDF board as a base but also use one to maintain the correct measures for the upper layers. This is mainly important for the moulding sheets I like to glue to the sides.


So after all these days of slow building and waiting I'm finally done and ready to paint this sucker, now guess what - I ran out of undercoat spray and so did my local hobby store. His order of new spray paint is already over a week overdue. :/


Coming next in part 3: Dock Section I - Painted

Cobblestone Streets & Stonework by Vampisol

Recently, while browsing a railway modeling forum I discovered a German terrain supplies manufacturer: Vampisol. The site is in German only so I'll try my best to provide translations in the following to help any interested non-German to find their way around there.

In the "Spur 0" range (see: O Scale) there are two sections with great products for 28mm wargamers: "Kopfsteinpflaster" (cobblestones) and "Mauerplatten" (stonework). Let's look at the cobblestones first:

Cobblestone Streets

"Segmentbogenpflasterplatte" (V3050),
cobblestone street with segmental arch pattern

"Anschlußstück, Kreuzungsbauteil Segmentbogenpflaster" (V3054),
connection/crossing piece for the segmental arch streets

There are two types of cobblestone patterns available:

• Segmental arch pattern (depicted above)
• Stretcher bond pattern (see below) [Wikipedia]

For both patterns there are supplemental products available such as kerbs ("Randsteine"), the segmental arch connection piece and a sidewalk.

"Pflasterplatte Großformat Reihenverband" (V3056),
stretcher bond cobblestone street (two pieces shown)

The segmental arch cobbles pieces measure 124mm x 131mm and cost €4,50.
The stretcher bond pieces measure 124mm x 70mm and cost €3,00 a piece.

There is a super useful street planner PDF file available that allows you to get a proper impression of the cobblestone pieces' sizes. This was very helpful and I wish every terrain manufacturer would offer similar guides for their products. Very good service indeed!

Stonework

The other cool section - "Mauerplatten" - consists of three types of stonework, each 118mm x 158mm board is €4,00. I ordered the "Bruchstein" (quarrystone, V3001):

"Bruchstein" (V3001), quarrystone wall

Comparison shot with a Black Scorpion pirate
and a fishwife by Warlord Games

The three available designs are: Ashlar, flagstone and the already mentioned quarrystone.

From left to right: "Bruchstein" (quarrystone), "Werkstein" (ashlar), "Haustein" (flagstone)

All mentioned Vampisol products are made from dental plaster. The stonework boards are available in either white or grey colour. A little word of caution: The cobblestone and stonework pieces are 2mm thin and some of them arrived broken from shipping. This is no big deal though because the breaking edges of the plaster are "clean" and are not visible when putting the pieces together. Also, there's always a small bag of plaster included to fill gaps with when assembling and "building" the final layout.

Verdict: Highly recommended! I have been looking for nice cobblestone and/or flagstone boards to pave my city with for quite a long time. So far I have only found Stronghold Terrain's cobblestone streets and Tabletop World's Town Square to be of acceptable quality. While the Stronghold streets are very nice in detail they are somewhat narrow. The Vampisol street tiles are designed to be extended in both length and width, so they are perfectly suited to build larger places such as market squares. In fact, I'm looking forward to using all three manufacturers' products for my board.


Update (July 17th): The new Vampisol website is up so the links are now fixed. Also, to see the finished cobblestones, check out Part 3 of the Gierburg dock section.