Thursday 18 May 2017

Trees as far as the eye can see

Over the last few days, a bunch of mail orders have arrived here from China. They're a variety of very cheap plastic trees, advertised on AliExpress as being for railway modeling, but naturally I intend to use them as wargame terrain.

They are not high-quality, diorama-standard models, but then for the price I wouldn't have expected that. The whole lot cost me about $US30, and there are about 300 trees in total, so roughly ten cents each. That's pretty good value.

15mm PzIV for scale.

There are four varieties — palms, a couple of conifers, and generic deciduous. The palms came in four sizes: the two shown here, and two smaller sizes at about 50mm and 30mm, which would be suitable for 6mm games.

I bought some smaller versions of the ones second from left before, for 6mm forest terrain. You can see how those turned out here.

I've mounted these ones in holes through 3mm MDF hexes, anchoring them on top with hot glue, and beneath by melting the plastic stem into a countersunk cavity with a soldering iron. It makes them very firmly fixed, and they won't come free without being cut free.

Countersunk holes beneath
The deciduous trees will need a heavy spray with diluted PVA, as their foliage is a bit loose and has a tendency to fall away, but that's no big deal.
Plastic stems melted into the cavities and smoothed off

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