Seeing a club mate’s continued progress on his pitch, and having had a conversation with another guy at the club about custom pitches whist spectating a frankly ridiculous Apocalypse game, has pushed me to start work on Wildwood Meadows again.
A while ago I bought a small hot wire cutter. Now, I imagined that this would be much like running a hot knife through butter and give me ultimate sculpting control over the blue foam. Instead, it was a slow and difficult control process, with not the best outcome. Rough sculpting one end of the pitch took a good hour, with not amazing results.
A plan B was required.
I decided that perhaps building the pitch surface up in squares would work, and discovered that with a deep score in the blue foam it snaps quite cleanly with a little force.
In this way, I set about scoring and snapping around a hundred 30x30mm squares of the stuff.
I next drew a grid on the MDF bottom of my pitch case, and by way of a number in each square representing the height of the square in milimetres, planned out the contours of the pitch. Each square varies from 0mm to 30mm, so there is a fair degree of difference between the highest and lowest point on the pitch. The point being to represent a natural glade that has been adapted into a pitch rather than a perfectly manicured flat pitch that you might find elsewhere in the old world.
I then started scoring and snapping the individual squares to size and gluing them down with PVA. After two evenings work I have completed about two thirds of the pitch surface. Here is one half of the pitch…
