Matakishi's Tea House
A simple little site...
This was an incredibly quick project. I wanted some hills for my desert board and I had some packs of 9mm cork wall tiles to use up so it was off to the local DIY shop for the other materials. You can use either PVA or wood glue to stick the tiles, I prefer wood glue because it doesn't shrink and is waterproof when dry. It's best to do the gluing the day before you want to actually cut your hills. Pair the tiles up and glue two together, one on top of the other, it's important that the edges are flush. Each tile has a smooth face and a more 'open' face, I wanted the smooth sides showing so I stuck the open faces together. This project uses two and a half packs of tiles which you can often find for as little as £4.99 each, total cost comes in at under £15.00. One of my packs had been used as a scratching post by my cats and I could only use about half of the tiles so I didn't have any left over, you could make more hills with your leftovers of course.
Once the tiles had been glued and left to dry overnight (just to be sure) I marked them up and spent a few minutes cutting them with my handy electric saw. They don't take much to cut by hand so don't be put off if you don't have access to a scroll saw or a jigsaw.
Finally they were covered with several coats of textured paint so they matched my existing table.
Here are the finished hill sections. I decided this was the best assortment of parts for the most versatility on the tabletop. If you've read my previous hills article you will recognise the basic components of a ridge but with the addition of a corner tile. Although the corner tile adds the cost of another pack of cork to the project it also adds a great deal more variety to the finished hill configurations and is well worth doing.
From left to right the components are as follows:
Front row: Ridge top, a single tile cut at 75mm and at 225mm to give three lengths. The two thinner sections are placed back-to-back to form a copy of the middle section.
Ridge base sides, two tiles cut at 150mm. The sides are placed back-to-back to form the base layer of a ridge.
Corner edge, cut from the mid point (150mm) of one side to the mid point (150mm) of an adjacent side to form an inner and outer corner edge.
Back row:
Base level ridge end (x2) an end cap cut irregularly using the full width of a tile (300mm) for its straight edge.
Top level ridge end cap cut irregularly and 150mm wide at its straight edge.
Here's the basic ridge, just over 900mm (three feet) long it provides a sizable area of high ground. The levels are 18mm tall which suits me as a reasonable trade off between looks and expense. There is nothing stopping anyone laminating more tiles to increase the heights if they want to. Figures are 30mm Chiltern SAS and a 28mm TAG Humvee.
The ridge can be split along its length to form two spurs, either equally like this or with a long and a short section if preferred.
With the addition of the corner section the ridge can be expanded to form an 'L' shaped hill. As you can see it covers a good amount of table space, it's overhanging this 2ft x 4ft (600mm x 1200mm) section at the back.
The corner section also alllows the pieces to be used in various ways to 'edge' the table. This is a fairly unrealistic example but you get the idea. Cut some shapes out of card and have a play around, the possibilities, while not endless, are many and varied.
When you're done the pieces fit together to form a light and compact pile, easy to store and transport.
