Terrain 101

This is my single most handy tool. well besides my hobby knife.....

it works as a thick sturdy ruler and lets me quickly check angles on what ever i am making.

This one is a slightly nicer one i got from home depo but i only got that because i have been into wood working more recently and for what we are doing something like 12-inch-combination-square-set from harbor freight is what i worked with for years.

this is what we will be working on to show you how to make a proper box and to make the angled pieces you will need for so many templates. It is bugbates mini fortress. i cant seem to find a link back to his list on i believe it was dakadaka. oh well i will add it in as soon as i find it 

i will do a full run down on how i built this tower in the next week or 2 so if you are interested keep an eye on this page. 

first step get out the scissors and cut out the 2 sections we will need to form the tower core. the 2 sections above are good pieces for showing how to put together buildings they will give us one square box and and nice sloped skirting for it that also forms another box. it is also a good way of seeing how easily crushable foam core gets much stronger the more pieces you add to it.

any way the first this that everyone should look at is HOW to cut a nice straight line. now you could free hand down the lines you traced onto your fome core.

But that ends up being off most of the time on longer cuts so my suggestion is to pull the ruler out of your combination square and cut like this but with the hand i have holding the camera holding the ruler.

as long as you keep your blade sliding along the ruler it comes out great every time. just keep your fingers away from the blade but i don't think i need to tell you people that.

after you do the 4 copy's of this you need and the 4 copy's of the other piece.

You will have to move beyond cutting nice flat square lines but you should also be getting good at it at this stage. so it was all worth it. Now comes the part that most people have troubles with. All the templates I have ever seen assume that all the pieces you are working with are paper thin and that is because they are all most forced to due to the format of being printed on paper. so we have to make them fit together like they are that thin. not as hard as you think i assure you. 

this is how i do it just place the tip of your knife where the piece needs to end and slide your ruler back and make it even the whole way across then you have something to keep your cut straight just like when we were cutting straight down .

after you get that end cut off you will see on this piece that there are a few more cuts to be made. that is because this piece is one joined angle piece so first trace the lines off this template on the start of both of the angled cuts.then it make sure you can do this as easily as possible use your rules like we did to cut the pieces out in the first place but only cut the paper from the first layer. then in a 2ed cut cut only the foam very lightly so you done cut the bottom piece of paper just like we did when cutting the angles that will join together the idea is to remove the parts that will be in the way of making the connections flush in the case of the parts that are separate pieces and to let the 2 half's bend together to form a nice angle on the bottom pieces. 

 This is what they should look like with you have all the pieces cut away.I think this is a good stopping point for today. please come back next week for the next installment of terrain 101 and keep an eye out for the full post on building bugbates mini fortress