Road-building

 A couple of years ago, when I had access to someone with a laser cutter, I got a bunch of road sections cut from 3mm MDF. My cunning plan was to give them interlinking jigsaw ends, so that they'd stay in place on the tabletop during a game.

That turned out not to be such a fantastic idea. It's not that it didn't work, but it made the individual pieces a lot more troublesome to lay out and to pick up afterwards.

So, now that I'm on a bit of a terrain-building kick, I've got on to actually making some roads out of the pieces, and I'm starting by cutting off the interlocking tabs. A good sharp saw takes care of that with just two or three strokes, so it's not a big deal.

I've bevelled all the edges on my belt sander, and the next step is to carve out the wheel tracks with a shallow 25mm gouge. That takes a little bit more time and effort than cutting the ends square. Then everything is given a quick once-over with very coarse sandpaper to knock all the edges off.

I'm not completely sure that this is a necessary step; I'll finish one section without carving to see if the difference is noticeable enough to make it worth while carving all the others.

This is the first finished section (with carved-out wheel tracks). I was a little worried that the MDF strips might warp under the paint and glue, but it turns out to be OK and sits quite flat. This is quite a short piece though, and some of the others are a lot longer.

I did consider adding a bit more vegetation along the sides of the road, but I decided against it as it would make the pieces a bit more difficult to stack and store.

If I decide later on that I'd prefer them a bit more overgrown, it's a simple matter to add more crap.

Later on

This piece hasn't had its wheel tracks carved out, and to my eye the difference is pretty minimal. I can tell the difference, but I'm not sure if that's because I know it's there.