Building a foldable pitch - Work in Progress

[Der_Doodle]

First of all sorry for the terrible english I just realised while writing that I never used alot of these technical words before I think

Hi there,
in my lokal tabletop league we just started a new season and got a couple of new members (raised from 9 to 15) and the new ones are highly motivated. This lead to two of them building an own pitch... and well that gave me the motivation (or forced me) to build my own pitch aswell. A long dream and now I'll do it.

Some basic Ideas about it first:

-We play often in pubs so the room to place a pitch is limited.
-> The pitch including Dugouts has to take up less room then the normal pitch.
-> Most pub tables are only 76cm deep (normal pitch is 78cm wich leads to shaken miniatures while standing up if your not carefull.
-> The new pitch has to be shorter then the normal pitch.

- It has to be transportable (since I dont own a car)
-> there for it has to be foldable and must not be too happy.

- it has to be afordable (I am a poor student at the university)

- I must be able to build it (with a limited supply of tools and skills) so no high fancy stuff like a full aluminium shiny board... so Styrodur and Wood will be my main materials.

With those basic ideas I made myself a rough plan for my board:

The normal pitch is 78x53cm without and 78x73cm with Dugoutboxes roughly. A normal Pub Table is then already too filled up to order a beer. So we will make our pitch a bit smaller. So I planned to make the new pitch including Dugoutboxes 76x65cm.
Around the pitch should be a frame (for one it looks nice and it gives more stability)

The Box


So I took the next bus to the next "do-it-yourself store" (is that the right word... ) and started to look around for some pieces of wood.

To start I bought a 0.5cm strong MDF (no idea of the english word for it is some kind of chip board I think) board in the size of 76x65 cm. For the frame I bought a 1cm thick and 4cm wide slat of beech (its dense and nice looking) Sadly to completly frame my board I need around 2.8 meters and those slats are only sold in 2.4 meter sizes so now I have a roughly 2meter piece wich I will mostlikely never need for anything.



As said earlier I must be able to transport the pitch with public transport (or a bike) so we make it foldable. For that there are 2 ways to cut the board.
a) 2 pieces each 65x38 cm. If I would fold the pitch now I would end up with an open side if folded together cause of the frame.
b) 3 pieces twice 65x34cm and once 65x8cm wich will be the bottom of my "box" if folded together.
I decided for option b) and I am happy that the store cuts the wood in the pieces I need (would look terrible if i would cut them with my little hand saw )



Then I bought aswell a couple of screws and hinges for later.

So after I transported everything back home with the bus (first test if the material would be too heavy or big to transport went ok) I started to work on my box.

The Frame had to be glues and fixed with screws on the MDF board.



In the first try I put the pieces with the small hinges together (sadly the store didnt have long hinges of less then 90cm so I only bought the small hinges. For the frame pieces for the middle piece of board I used hinges aswell since else the board could not be foldable.





Now with the middlepiece frame folded inside the box I could fold the complete Box together:



And now in the "transportable form" the Pitch has a size of 65x34x8 cm.



In a different Store I finally found some long hinged of 60 cms. so I quickly removed all those little hinges and installed the big one. To make it fit perfectly I cut a line into the pieces to hide the join of the hinges.



Now the box can be closed but could get open from alone so I added some hooks and eyes to keep it closed and fixaded two leather bands as handles.



At the bottom of the box I added a rubber mat (the kind you have under your feet in your cars).




Things to do for the box:

- make the outside of the box "pretty" I already bought 2 more 3mm thin MDF boards in beech optic to hide all those screws in it, but I can not glue them on the outside aslong as i have the inside not finished.

[Der_Doodle]

The Innlay:

Since I plan to use the pitch in a pub or cafe with limited space the dice area should be inside the pitch.

So before working on the inside I made a rough layout how and where I want to have the needed stuff

In the middle will be the pitch with a max size of 74x43cm. So if i keep an 0.5cm frame around the pitch there is enough space to make each square the size of 2.8cm (so slightly smaller then the normal 2.9cm pitch). On the right side of each player will be a cork board to roll the dize on the left side a small platt to place stuff.

From each trainers point of view on the right side of the pitch should be the dugout boxes and on the left side the coaches Reroll and Turn Markers. In the middle of the pitch should be on one side room for weather counters (the awesome weather moderator goblins from http://www.impactminiatures.com) on the other side of the pitch should be a scoreboard. And maybe additional room for some stuff like inducement miniatures (chef, babes, etc.)
Atleast thats the basic plan.



So here is a short preview of the area to the right side of each trainer. a 10x10cm corkplate to roll the dice on (most likely prefered with a cup) and the area for the dugout boxes of 21x10cm (the currently black cork plate area)



On the left side under the turn/reroll markers will be hidden boxes for dice inducement miniatures and the inducement cards:



On those boxes will be a plate with the Reroll and Turn markers wich can be folded up on hinges. For the rerollmarkes I cut 8 little pieces of 4mm thick of balsa wood and put each on an individual little hinge. Infront of those Rerollmarkers will be fields for the turn markers therefor I glued another little cork plate to that area.



The corkplate was painted black and on it where glued 8 2x2cm and 2mm thick cork pieces for the 8 turns. After that the fields for the turn markers where drybrushed grey and the black area was coated with grass. the complete plate was then fixed on the boxes with a 5cm wide hinge.





The Dugout Area:

At first I glued static grass on the black painted (see above) Dug Out Areas and in the next step i build some little fences to seperate the reserves from the injured and knocked out (Mc D's little wooded Coffee sticks are awesome for that)

The fences were painted brown and then washed with black ink.

In the next step I "digged" holes into the grass to place the fences.

And then the fences met the glue and finally met the dugout area.

To mark the individual zones I made some little wooden signs and painted them like the fences.

Wich after they got dug in and glued into the grass finished my dugout areas



The Scoreboard:

On a 11.5x10cm MDF Board with a 0.5cm thick cork plate on top the scoreboard was placed.

The Scoreboard was made the same way as the fences from wooden coffee sticks (thanks again McD).
The Score Plates can be placed on the board on a little hook.



The complete scoreboard plate has to be placed in one of the free spots between Reroll/Turnmarker Area and the Dugout Zone.





The Weather Tower:

Here a first pic of the base of it. Again MDF Board with cork on it and grass.
Aswell on it is already the "mini-tower" for the Camera Snot.




and the current status of the "real" Weather Tower



And the rough concept for the 10x10cm area to the bottom left of the pitch from each coachs view:

[Der_Doodle]

The pitch

Since I still have an old Astrogranite Field of the 2nd Edition of Bloodbowl I first thought about using that one as my new pitch. The squares of the pitch are each 2.5x2.5cm. This is quite a bit shorter then the "new" pitch of the 3rd Edition wich has 2.9x2.9cm squares. But well I really liked it having those advanced squares and the doubleskull in the center of the pitch so I gave it a try.



The old pitch is in 3 pieces (good) but the middle piece is too big (bad) to fit into my box. So I had to work on the pitch. I cutted the middle piece in three (2-4-2 rows) and glued and pinned those small 2 row pieces to the bigger outside pieces. Now I had a three piece pitch wich would fit into my foldable box. So next step was painting it all black, painting the skull white and adding white lines for the LoS the endzone and the widezones.
In a later step the field should filled with grass.




After a training match on that pitch with a friend (playing Ogres but having them all on square 1" bases) I realised quickly that an 1" square pitch is not working. It really is a pain to turn big miniatures around after each move of place them prone/stunned on the pitch in a crowded area.... So the old astrogranite pitch went back to my attic.

So new plan build an own pitch. the maximal area the pitch can have inside my box are 74x43cm. A Bloodbowl pitch has 26x15 squares so that would mean up to 2.84x2.86 cm per square. So I decided to make my new pitch with squares of 2.8cm per side the little frame I get around the pitch that way can always be used to add Blood Bowl Advertisements later.

So now I have to build a pitch. So I went to the next home improvement store to buy some Styrodur. Sadly the first three stores i visited didnt have any wich i found usefull (either they were atleast 3cm thick and therefor too thick for my box if I want to add advertisements or they where with some kind of structure on it) But luckily in the fourth and final store in my town I found a 2cm thick plain plate of Styrodur.
So first step... cutting the plate to the right size of 73x45cm.
Next Step getting a ruler and a pen and painting all those lines onto the pitch for later (really dull work)



Now how to make the lines between the squares permanent to play later... I plan to put grass on my pitch so painting the lines on it doesnt work well... adding little crosses on it wasnt the way I wanted it for my pitch either. So I decided to cut the lines into the pitch (so it would look a little bit like the old astrogranite pitch again).
But how to do it... using a cutter would be a way bout sounds complicated... but since its styrodur it could be melted easy. Now how to melt the lines into the Styrodur.... I know someone used some short iron rods wich he heated up on a stove.... and well it sounded like a complicated way so I decided against it. So I picked my old Soldering Gun (if it can melt down tin-solder it should have no problem melting Styrodur)



And with a steel ruler I melted all those lines into my pitch. As a sidenote at this point never do stuff like this in a closed room. I did it myself outside in the garden but since I kept my head over the pitch while working I still got quite some headache after I was finished with it.
In the next step the complete pitch was painted black.



After that I could my pitch again in 3 pieces (like the astrogranite pitch) with a middle piece of 4 rows and painted in white the lines for the widezone, the endzones and the LoS.





Now I could finally add the grass to my pitch. I planed to have the grass in 2 colors to give my pitch slight lawn mow effect like at a real football pitch so I used two types of grass (spring and summer). To glue the grass on the pitch I used watered down wood glue (with a single drop of dish soap to remove the surface tension of the water) and carefully painted the glue on the pitch without letting it drop into the lines. Then I added the grass (spring color) on half the pitch.



After the glue dryed I knocked left over grass off the board and repeated the above with the 2nd grass on the rest of the pitch. To fixade the grass later I used spray varnish on the complete pitch.



Next steps for the pitch:
- Bloodbowl Advertisements around the pitch.

[Da Crusha]

its looking pretty cool so far. keep up the good work. Ive been interested in making my own and am working on schematics, already made a list of materials.

[Der_Doodle]

So finally the 3rd post with the pitch is added aswell

And the stadium is already in a state where I could play on it. (It just lacks some Markers for the Turnmarker Area and a Scoreboard and the dugout isnt splitted yet into three areas)

Sadly so far I am lacking ideas in how to splitt the three areas of the dugout and even worse lacking completly the idea of how to build a scoreboard that would fit into an 10x10cm area

[sann0638]

Excellent idea to varnish the pitch - I'm losing grass by the bucketload! May need to returf at some point

[Jonny_P]

This looks awesome!

[nazgob]

Looks absolute superb!

[Der_Doodle]

As i am still clueless about how to seperate the Reserves from the Ko and the Cas I might need some help

i tried some wooden fences but I am not sure if that would fit in...
here is a first test of them (ofcourse they have to be painted in a darker brown)

[inkpwn]

I love the camera idea with the little gun conversion, top points to you good sir. (Stealing that idea FYI )

[Der_Doodle]

I love the camera idea with the little gun conversion, top points to you good sir. (Stealing that idea FYI )

fair deal since I "borrowed" a couple of ideas wich I used in my stadion from other people aswell

[Tritex]

Looks really cool

[Da Crusha]

... lacking completly the idea of how to build a scoreboard that would fit into an 10x10cm area

I have seen someone use a scoreboard with hooks sticking out and as touchdowns are scored they just hang the new score on the hook. cant find the exact one I was talking about, but something like this: http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9 ... KpDg8Ae3WA

[Chris]

Are you completely againsta bag of extras? So dice tower, dividers, etc?

I have got a load of stuff recently to use as sideline models with a view to making a transportable pitch (my old Ogre one is not...) but they would have to be seperate modiules as I can't think how to combine chaps like this with a case
http://wargamesfoundry.com/_images/thum ... odid=38816
(He is going to be the eye in the sky launcher!)

[Der_Doodle]

Are you completely againsta bag of extras? So dice tower, dividers, etc?

Nah dont have troubles with extras as long as they can be easy to transport.

Current plan for one of the free spots in the middle of the box is a weather moderator tower (to turn depending on weather with all 5 miniatures in it) This I will have to transport in a sepparete case anyways and for the other spot the scoreboard has to be extra aswell (if i fold my box there isnt any room in those two spots so whatever goes there has to be transported outside of the box)

@Da Crusha:
The idea about a scoreboard with hooks and little slates with the numbers sounds nice... I guess I will think about that a little bit more.
A thing like that I have seen on impact... but I am not sure if it is too big.
Does anyone has the actual size (wide, hight, deep) of that one:
http://www.impactminiatures.com/index.p ... id=MM_SCRB
it is described as 13cm high and 7cm wide... but atleast on the picture it looks in the left to right direction (wich i would count as wide) bigger then in the up to down direction (wich i would describe as high) according to the measurements it should be twice as high then it is wide.... but it really doesnt look that way...