No-Mans Land Combat Mat (Home-made with A4 Vinyl Sheets)

**Nicola Zee** · 09-20-2014 08:15

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The official combat mats are great but for the western front the lack of no-mans land is a bit of a drawback.

Lugburz has posted up a great image for no-mans land in the following post
http://www.wingsofwar.org/forums/sho...ain-free-files
My thanks to Lugburz for posting up such a great image.

I thought wouldn't it be great to combine the no-mans land image with the official mats but I wanted to do it on the cheap. So, I purchased A4 Matt Vinyl Self Adhesive Sticker Paper from Paper Photo Direct.

I created a set of A4 images and printed them onto the Vinyl A4 sheets using an inkjet printer with borderless printing enabled.
I created a funky foam mat by sticking together 2 sheets of A3 foam and 1 sheet of A4. Green is recommended as the edges don't show up as much. Then the printed out Vinyl sheets are stuck onto the Funky foam mat. This creates a mat 12 inches wide.

One thing to note is that the funky foam sheets are not necessarily cut straight - so make sure you have a straight edge before sticking on the vinyl sheets. After the sheets are stuck on, cut off the excess with scissors - the foam cuts really easy.

I used other vinyl sheets, also, to print out a few balloon images and clouds.

The great thing about this technique is that it's cheap to create extra mats - say for an airfield or canal or whatever.

2 Sheets of A3 funky foam plus 1 sheet of A4 cost around £3
40 sheets of vinyl A4 cost me around £22 including delivery. It takes 5 sheets to make the combat mat.

PS. Please note the two big combat mats on either side of the no-man's lands are the official Ares combat mats. I did not make these but purchased them. I would not recommend making a huge combat mat printing A4 sheets as it take too much work. I just made the no-mans land in the middle. It might be possible to make a large combat mat with A3 funky foam taped together.

**Mrkev** · 09-20-2014 10:34

Looks great! Really adds a lot to the look of the game

**va beach ace** · 09-20-2014 11:18

cool!!!

**Barkmann** · 09-20-2014 13:49

Nice!

**Nicola Zee** · 09-21-2014 01:33

Thanks for the kind comments.
Wouldn't it be great if Ares produced a combat mat something like this?

PS Just to give credit where credit is due, it's really the Ares combat mats that look great. My small combat mat of the trenches just fills in a missing piece.

**FarEast** · 09-21-2014 01:51

Wouldn't it be nice if someone could rehost that map!!! can't find it anywhere!

**Nicola Zee** · 09-21-2014 01:59

Originally Posted by FarEast

Wouldn't it be nice if someone could rehost that map!!! can't find it anywhere!

I've not hosted the map for the following reasons:

1. It's mainly a copy of someone else's image. I'll need to get permission from him first.
2. I'm not sure about uploading a really big image to the forum
3. Last but not least, I've learnt a lot while doing it and so I'd redo it to make it look nicer. For a start the edge is a bit abrupt. This will take time - my image editing abilities are surprisingly terrible considering I used to be a computer programmer.