Raft Making

The next "Song Of..." campaign battle takes part on a river, with the warbands on boats or rafts, so I thought it was a good incentive to make some simple, roughly hewn rafts.

 For the body I was going to need some "logs". I know that a walk in the woods can produce a bundle of sticks, but I rarely see any thin and straight enough for a raft (or 4 in this case). I also had a bag of sticks that I'd bought ages ago with view to making a wooden palasade (which never got past the whittling stage). These are from a Pet Store and are sold in a bundle for Rabbits,etc to gnaw on.

I decided that 6 stciks would make a raft of suitable width. 2 logs (nominally the thickest) were chosen to be the edge logs and had one length sanded to make a better gluing surface. The remain 4 logs had 2 sides sanded so that they would press up together and glue more effectively.

 Glue alone would still be a bit brittle, so holes were drilled through the logs (fore and aft) and wire threaded through (I used a straightened paper clip). The Edge logs were not drilled all the way through to hide the scratchy wire ends.

The raft was assembled with the wire and white glue between the logs.

To strengthen the bond I also squeezed white glue in the joins on the underside of the raft, using a finger to push the glue down into the gap and wipe off excess. It was all left to dry.

 The raft needs some sort of basic steering mechanism. To represent this a couple of pieces of matchstick were assembled on the back of the raft as a rudder handle (the back of the handle dipping to table\water level). The "oar" was then given a quick light brown wash and (once dry) the whole lot given a quick spray of matt varnish to cover any shine from any visible dry glue.

Here is the end result with prospective crew. Ideally some sort of string could be glued across the width as binding rope, but I couldn't find any thin enough that didn't look out of place. Once the models are on the effect is good enough to work anyway I feel.