Making river pieces

This will be part one of two posts. I have recently made a 4" hex mat from a pice of green camo fleece. I also made a set of simple styrofoam hills to match the 4" hex grid. Now I am working on a set of river pices for the same terrain system.

These are pieces of very thick cardboard - about 1/8" thick. I cut four 60 degree curves, 2 four inch straights, an 8 inch straight, a 120 degree curve and two forks.

Next I added river banks using sculpey clay, train ballast for small rocky patches, and a few actual rocks to be, well, rocks. Everything was textured with sculpting tools, and then sealed with watered down white glue. Finally I glued the pieces down to a wooden board and built the walls using black foam board. These walls will provide the sides of the rubber mold.

I used OOMOO-30 from Smooth-On to create the rubber molds. This is a two part epoxy product, you mix it together, and pour it into the frame. Once it is cured you can remove the originals from the rubber mold. As you can see from the photos the demolding process completely destroyed my originals. No big deal, I expected it. Here you can see the purple rubber molds that are now ready for pouring resin pieces!

Here is a picture of one mold starting to set up and turn white, the other has two pieces freshly poured with the clear resin liquid. The product I used here is Smooth Cast 300, also from Smooth On. Smooth Cast is another two part epoxy. You pour the two parts together, stir and then carefully pour it into the mold. It sets up in about 5 minutes and is cured in about an hour.

And here is the result! A nice pile of river terrain pieces! One trial size of Smooth Cast got me 34 river pieces. The next blog post will show you the painting process. See you then!