75th Anniversary of Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Terrain Build)
Defensive Obstacles
The battle for Italy was a series of assaults on heavily defended positions. With the bunkers and machine gun nests complete, I’m going to need plenty of obstacles to slow the attackers down. So I need to make minefields, tank traps and barbed wire entanglements.
I’m going to use the same approach for all of these to keep things simple. And for the minefield, I’m just going to create an area terrain, no signs with skulls on or ‘obvious’ mines buried in the ground.
In Flames of War, these area obstacles are usually 2″ by 8″. I will start with some 3mm MDF and cut some bases to the above dimensions. I will also cut a few to 2″ by 4″ so that they can fit around other terrain. I’ve chamfered the edges so that it will eventually blend in with the table.
The tank traps and the supports for the barbed wire will be made out of tile spacers. I bought a bag of 200 of the smallest spacers I could find from my local tiling shop for a couple of quid. These are 2mm in width (ideal) but have a bit more depth to them than I would like.
In the picture below, you can see on the left an original spacer. I’ve then trimmed the ends off so that they are about 6mm in length. The one in the middle will be used for the tank trap and the one on the right will be used for the barbed wire.
The tile spacers. In the middle and right, cut to the correct size.The tank traps need two spacers glued together to create a cross shape. Everything was then primed with my cheap, trusty Halfords grey primer.
These are now ready to be added to the base.
Primed and ready to go.
Leave a Reply