Necromunda Gaming Board Build

Your ideas for embedding bolts or using a pin system are really interesting. I don't recall ever seeing those approaches to making the terrain more stable. Could you possibly use magnets in some way instead of the pin system? Perhaps get a thin piece of sheet metal to sandwich between the MDF layer and the tiles, then simply put magnets into the bottoms/bases of your terrain? It would probably depend on how thick your tiles are and how strong the magnets are... but if it works, it could be a simple and very flexible solution.

P.S. - this is something I wish I had tried with my board build, but the idea hadn't struck me then...
 
Thanks, really appreciate the positive feedback.
I was thinking that to be useful I need quite a good distribution of tie down points. But - they will stick up out of the board, and create less ‘open space’. Which is probably ok for a terrain heavy game like Necromunda.
Putting them in the tiles means I avoid holes down inside the base, as @MusingWarboss is warning for control of warpage due to inconsistent expansion of the wood.
The pin system could be a nice half way house for smaller things like containers and bigger scatter terrain pieces. It just means modifying those STLs, which is going to take a bit of time.
I’ve laid out the 50mm grid so I can avoid the ‘tolerance stack up’ problem. Starting on one side of the board and butting each tile together will wind up a mess by the time I get to the other side.
The test piece I’m doing now is a 6 x 6 grid, wondering whether a 1mm pin, going into a 1.2mm hole is loose enough to allow me to use a standard mounting template, but tight enough so that stuff stays where I put it.
I’ll hopefully get some more tiles printed today, start glueing them down for testing.
 
Had some time this weekend to try out the anchor nuts and pins idea.

I created a 6 x 6 tile pattern on an offcut of 6mm MDF, then printed out a series of tiles to mix up both the M3 nut anchor tiles and regular tiles. This gives a useful test of real world tolerances.


The slightly lighter colour tiles at the back are printed with a 0.3mm nozzle, to see whether the increased detail is worth it over 0.4mm. To me at least it doesn’t seem worth the extra print time.

The anchor nut tiles (with M3 Nylok nuts in them) should work well, and I can use some longer threaded rod to create some fairly tall structures. Happy with that.

The tolerances on the pins measured approx. -0.4 to +0.4 across various ranges, I guess that’s in line with what I was expecting. The hole pitch is 42mm, on the 50mm tiles.

I printed out some test pieces with 1mm pins spaced at 42mm, 92mm and 142mm, left the pins protruding out 3mm.

I just cut them from piano wire, and the first thing to note is they’ll easily rip your skin if you’re not careful!. I ground them a bit smoother, but maybe there’s a commercially available dowel pin that might be better. Needs to be about 10mm.


The short version - it works really well! The sweet spot seems to be a 1.3mm hole in each corner of the tile. The pins will bend ever so slightly in the hole to accommodate. All 3 test pieces fit anywhere on the board I tried, no play.



Next step is to modify the tile STLs I have to put pin holes in, and some anchor nuts with suitable detail to add camouflage.

And I’m putting off setting up the drill press to counter bore the magnets for the main board sections. I know that’s going to be a job I don’t want to screw up 🙄
 
That’s a great thread, thanks for posting that. Looks like you’ve been busy! Love the resin pours and the sump city theme.

I‘ve put this little project on pause for now, I actually played my first ever game of Necromunda at the end of May - really enjoyed it.

I’ve been concentrating on getting some gaming infrastructure together for future games, packing it up in a backpack.

Been printing out and doing some test painting on these 6” square tiles:


I‘ll start a few smaller threads with pictures and upload some STLs to Thingiverse.