In between my truly amazing projects, I also do a lot that merely evoke an offhand “Ehh, that’s kinda neat, I suppose”. Most aren’t really worth blogging about, but here and there I find one that I can tap out a thousand or so words about as a filler.

Today we’re going to look at one of those.

The objective of this project was to make some themed terrain markers for the Infinity Tournament System. Several of the missions involve taking control of “transmission antennae”; I wanted to make a set of them that could be marked to indicate who controls each one.

Ownership of each antenna will be marked with strips of green and red craft foam that slide in and out of a main housing.

Apologies in advance to any Dichromats in the audience– you aren’t going to get much out of this exercise. 😉

The craft foa strips will slide in and out of a central housing as they’re captured. Craft foam has little strength on its own and wouldn’t stand up to that kind of stress, so I’m attaching each strip to a thin brass tube that will bear most of the stress.

I was working on these pieces without much advance planning, and as such I jumped around between various parts a bit erratically as I puzzled out how everything would fit together. Here I’ve cut out the foam pieces that will make up the outer housing for the antennae.

Craft foam doesn’t make clean folds very well– rather, it tends to curve lazily when bent. I did what I could with a ruler, pressing the edge sharply into the foam and bending around it. The result is still fairly curvy, but it’s the best I could do without messing around with a heat gun.

The top of each housing would be attached to the antenna sliders and slide in and out with them. Here I’ve drawn the seam where each cap will be cut out; next, I’ll cut these out with an XActo knife.

I keep the cut-off caps for each housing near the piece they were cut from so that the pieces that exactly fit back together end up on the same antenna.

The piece I’m building will ultimately be five sheets of foamcore thick– a central layer for the coloured sliders, two outer sheets for the housing, and then two intermediate layers that act as a stopper, to keep the sliders from coming out. Here I’m adding the stopper layer on the top of the housing; a matching stopper will be put on each slider to keep them in place.

The top blue parts stop the sliders from falling in, while the bottom ones stop them from popping out.

The tops of the housing that I cut out earlier are glued around the tops of the sliders. Then, additional layers of foam are stacked on the bottom of the housing to fill it out.

The housing is then glued shut, using another angled stopper piece to hold the two sides together.

The bottom is just glued to the filler layers.

Ta-da!

Each of the antennae pull out about an inch, letting players indicate who controls each one.

With the first one figured out, I then mass-produced the rest of the set– you need a total of five to cover all of the ITS scenarios.

MOAR FOAM

MEASURE CUT MEASURE CUT GLUE MEASURE CUT CUT GLUE CUT GLUE

Yep.

I then needed to rig up the actual antenna portion of each one. For this I used a sheet of 1/4″ craft foam.

I wanted to make little grooved cut-out segments, which is as simple as cutting a little chunk out and then gluing it back in place.

Each one had a small cut-out on top, and then another cut-apart groove halfway up. The two sides were reconnected with a brass rod and then hot-glued back together.

The whole mess was then glued to the main housing so that it covered up the wrap-around seam. The pieces that had been cut out of the antennae also looked good attached to the back, so I glued those on.

One more layer of craft foam for some added surface detailing, and we’re done. 😀

The last step was to build bases for the antennae to sit on. I needed these to be heavy, but also needed them to glue sturdily to the craft foam antennae, so I essentially made Oreo cookies out of two circles of craft foam wrapped around steel discs, with glue around the entire outer edge holding the sandwich together (since hot glue is pretty useless at sticking to smooth metal).

KWA-BAM!

The last step was to paint them. I wanted to use the naturally vibrant colours of the red and green craft foam as they were, so I covered them with electrical tape while I was spraying the rest.

I decided that dark blue was a nice base colour.

The spraying was cut short when my neighbor yelled at me for spraying on what I thought was an empty lot but which he apparently owns, so I had to fiinish the basecoat by hand with a brush.

I painted a few panels in grey as an accent to the blue. I wanted to use very toned-down paints so that the bright red and green ownership strips stood out clearly.

And that’s how I came to own five awesome antennae. I’ve started work on the other ITS objective markers (crates, crash coffins, objective rooms, and security terminals), but these all still need some work before they can be shown off. More on those in the coming months. 🙂

-Spud