3 May 2017

Tutorial: Wooden Palettes

Wooden palettes are great little pieces of scatter terrain. I love doing multi purpose terrain and these will work for all my modern, post-apoc and sci-fi games.

One of the issues with a lot of scatter terrain, is that it'll fall over and get pushed around during games. Often just becoming an annoyance or getting ignored. And like most gamers I have lots of small scatter pieces. Gluing some barrels, crates and cannisters to a palette will prevent that and give the whole thing a bit more mass

Materials:
  • Popsickle sticks / coffee stirrers
  • Match sticks
  • Super glue (or wood glue)
  • Clippers (or hobby knife)

Step 1:
For each palette you'll ned 4 popsickle sticks and three matches.


Step 2:
Cut of the round ends with your clippers.

Step 3:
Cut the four popsickle sticks in half, for a total of eight pieces.

Step 4:
I use super glue (but if you're patient you can of cause use wood glue). Line up the three matches on three popsickle sticks. Went it's lined up, I dap superglue on all three popsickle sticks and drop the matches into it.



Step 5:
Turn it over and add the last two popsickle sticks. Doing it like this will make sure you don't run out of space before using all 5 sticks.


Step 6: 
Turn over the palette and add three sticks to the other side.


Done palettes: 
Using super glue makes it fast to build these. If using wood glue, I suggest you get a very large wor space going. So you can start multible palettes at the same time. I build 12 palettes in an hours worth of hobby time.
Scatter terrain:
Anything goes for scatter terrain. But keep you eye out in second hand stores and at flea markets. The oil drums below I got for 10 Danske Kroner, that's well below 2 EUR, 2 USD or 2 GBP. The bunch of metal pipes are from an old dinosaur toy set and the wheels are from a broken toy car. The remaing cannisters and boxes are Mantic Games battlezone stuff. I've cut it up and rearranged most of it. 






 Showcase:
 All painted up and weathered. I've added danger stripes and warning signs to some of it using these 'Warning Danger Signs'. I've glued the scatter pieces to the palettes, in such a manner that there's room for 25mm round bases on all of them.




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