With The Other Partizan behind me and looking for a project to carry me through the winter, it seems a good time to think about next year's demo games. With the 250th anniversary of the AWI reaching 1777 there are plenty of potential scenarios to consider. I'm pretty certain that one game will be the second Saratoga battle (Bemis Heights) and the other could well be Germantown, or a slice of it anyway.
Second Saratoga means redoubts, and generic ones really aren't too suitable for what I have in mind. Burgoyne's army constructed significant defences following the first battle (Freeman's Farm) and the two which are key to any tabletop game are Balcarres' large and complicated redoubt, which incorporated the buildings of Freeman's Farm itself, and Breymann's less impressive and fatally flawed redoubt with its open rear. There were also some fortified cabins and a smaller redoubt "The Bloody Knoll" that I might represent too.
My first project is the largest, the Balcarres' redoubt which was a fishhook shape around 500 yards long and 350 yards wide, with earthworks and log walls up to 16 feet high, stretching across two low hills, with a stream running between them. I fiugured it was best to get the most daunting part of the build out of the way first and this would make anything else seem more straightforward.
The redoubt can be seen in the pictures below. I'm not aiming for a 100% faithful scale model, but something suitable for wargaming and as close as I can reasonably get while keeping things playable.
My normal ground scale for AWI battles is around 8" = 100 yards (sometimes compressing to 6"), so with a bit of fudging I settled on a redoubt of around 36" long and 16' wide, built up on a base of around 4' x 2' allowing the slopes of the hills to be sculpted.
The biggest worry I have about a piece this large, which will inevitably need some "wet" materials is warping. I can get away with a little distortion as the terrin will be placed on a fleece mat with a soft underlay of hanging-basket liner, but there's a fairly small degree of tolerance and no one wants a redoubt that turns into a see-saw.
So, I drew up a plan that would construct a wooden frame inside the hills to form the foundation of the defences. The frame woulf be glued and screwed together to form a skeleton and this would then be glued to a 5mm plywood base and strengthened by screwing through from underneath. XPS foam would then be glued down around the skeleton as the basis of the contours. This would give the base level of hills and stream, aling with a solid base onto which I could then attach the second layer of earth bank, firing step, etc. The third level would be the log walls and the top of any banked earth. Once this is all done I can add abatis, etc.
The construction of the other defences would use a similar approach, but should be a bit more straightforward.
Yesterday I jumped in the car and popped down to Wickes to pick up some materials. Two pieces of 5mm x 2' x 4' ply should give enough baseboards for the whole project. I wasn't sure how much timber I would end up needing so stated with three pieces of 22mm x 44mm x 6' planed softwood. I also added 15mm, 40mm and 60mm screws and a tube of Gorilla grab glue, hoping that this would be faster and less wet than PVA. Here is the haul, ready to start work:
I began by constructing the framework that would underly the whole of the Balcarres' redoubt model. As planned, the pieces were joined with grab glue and then screwed together by drilling holes horizontally through each join with both pieces clamped to a flat surface, ensuring the screw heads were sunk into the wood and not protruding. This was mostly done with the 40mm screws and using a large drill bit to make the initial part of the hole larger than the screwheads; more effective than using a countersink bit at an angle. In the pictures below the frame is not yet attached to the plywood base. The southern end of the piece has an additonal piece of wood as a brace. This will not be built up as an earthwork, but will be hidden within the southern hill. There is a southern piece and a northern piece that do not connect as there is a gap where the stream will flow through. To give strength in the construction phase I have screwed on a piece of scrap wood that you can see below too:
This is not precise carpentry as you might have noticed...
After leaving everything over night so the glue could properly set, I started this morning with the jigsaw and electric sander (sorry neighbours, but I did wait until after 9 am), to shape the baseboard into something a bit more organic and interesting:
The next step was to place the XPS foam sheets where I wanted them to go and mark these with the shape of the wooden frame so that I could cut the foam to shape. I needed to do this while the frame was still unattached to the baseboard:
The foam was then moved aside ready for cutting (with a small saw, I don't have a wire cutter), and the fram was glued in place to the baseboard with more grab glue. Pilot holes were then glued vertically through the frame and baseboard so that I could then flip the whole thing over and use 15mm screws to firmly connect the base and frame (yes I did countersink these), and also help the glue to get the firmest hold:
Turning everything the right way up I then cut the marked foam into the required shapes and glued these down:
The final (fifth) piece of foam from the pack I'd bought from Amazon was then cut down and used along with some other offcuts to complete the coverage of the baseboard in and around the wooden frame.
That is probably as far as I'll get today as the glue now really needs 24 hours so I can be confident of a firm bond before I start cutting the foam to shape. I have popped a coulple of wooden battens over the top of this, wirghed down with some boxes of metal figures, so hopefully I'm staving off that warpage!
So far I have used just over one of the pieces of timber, one of the pieces of ply, all the grab glue in one tube and all five sheets of foam (although there will be offcuts from the latter).
Tomorrow's jobs, probably:
- Shape the foam to the edge of the baseboard using a small saw or old breadknifr if I can find it.
- Chamfer the foam to look more like two hills using the same tools as above.
- Smooth the foam with the electric sander
- Build up the north and south ends of the redoubts using more 22x44mm timber, gluing and screwing as I go, and also screwing this layer into the lower frame using 40mm screws.
The next layer of timber will represent the firing step and the earth bank. I'll use foam offcuts on each side of it to represent banked earth.
I definitely need to get more grab glue and order another pack of foam so I have enough for this and for Breymann's redoubts (and The Bloody Knoll, perhaps).
If this seems to be coming together quickly, don't be fooled. This is the easy part. There will be lots of time consuming processes before this is finished and lots of waiting for things to dry. This is a project to take me through to Chiristmas, not to complete in a couple of weekends.
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