Terrain is everything - fences

Here's a 'Birthday treat' from me to you, which is why this post has come a day early. The terrain and tutorials are some of my most viewed articles so I thought I'd bring one of my oft-pondered terrain ideas into the blog.

Back when I was gaming in 6th form my mate Liam, he of the scratch built Warhound and Warlord, used to make a fair bit of terrain too. One of his best ideas were chain link fences. Using aluminium car-body repair mesh and some wooden pegs [which his dad, a pub landlord, used to have loads of from tapping the kegs]. I'm not sure if the wooden pegs even had two grooves in or Liam ran a hack-saw down them but these fences were awesome, cheap and quick to make. I loved them so much when I got to uni and our local purveyor of all things cheap and cool, Trago Mills, had 5 packs of the mesh 'cheap-cheap' I bought some. Now I know that pack is still around somewhere but do I know where? Do-I-eckers-like! And I'll be damned if I buy anymore only to find them, bearing in mind this stuff isn't so 'cheap-cheap' anymore.

Anyway, in it's stead I've loads of Granny Grating. One of my work colleagues had some vouchers for Fred Aldous and I got around five A3 sheets, more than I could possibly find a use for. I thought I'd knock up some fences but I was going to turn the grating 45° so I got me some diagonal chain link fence. However, just the other day I was leaning on the fence at my local train station only to realise that stuff was square, not only that but it was blue, exactly the pale blue Anita's craft acrylic I have. It must be some anti-corrosion coating, although there's plenty of Devlan Mud washed into all the creases. So I got the urge to finally make these beauties, from real life no less, purely as a test.

You'll really only need three things,

1. a base, here I've daringly chosen some mounting card, I'm playing 'warp roulette' yet again!
2. Some Granny Grating
3. Some Rawplugs, wall-plugs, whatever you call them

As you can see below I've cut some 6" strips of grating [handy for movement guessing] some 6" bases, angled at the edges so we can rotate the fences around each other for maximum fence deployment. I've cut a chunk out of the grating as this slides down the centre split of the plug.

These are all PVA'd together and I'll be hot melt gluing them to the base when I next pick this up. They're super quick to do, which is as well because I'd rather be doing 20 of these than the 2 but I just want to ensure the cardboard doesn't warp too much. I have a stock sufficient for this task and I'd rather use it up than cut hardboard for more durability but also more heartache.

Really looking forward to the painting though as the red 'rockcrete' with blued, corroded steel mesh should look quite striking!