Tabletop terrain - the first plate

(Deutsche Version) Let's start with the first and easiest plate: Grass. The Plate looks like this:

The plate consists of a 10 mm thick MDF plate topped by a 10 mm styrofoam plate (this makes is possible to have structures which are up to 1 cm deeper than the basis height). On top there is a layer of grass. You can buy grass at a cheap price at ebay. To glue the grass to the plate, I use a 1:1 mixture of Ponal Holzleim and water. This allows you to spread the glue all over the plate before it is dry. As a colour, I use wall paint, this is quite cheap. Alternatively I used spray colours, unfortunately they are quite expensive (but easy to apply).

This is the basic construction of the terrain plate. One problem left to solve is to prevent the movement of the plates. If you would use the plates like they are now, they could move and there appear gaps. Therefore I had to think of a simple principle to have the plates to lock to each other. On the bottom side of each plate, there is a triangle at each corner which pokes out and a notch which locks to such a triangle. The triangle and notch look like this:

I use a wooden bar of the size 20x10 mm which is cut into pieces of the lengths 4 and 2 cm. The long piece fits with the long edge to a diagonal of the plate to have the corners to coincide. The short piece has to fit on the other side of the diagonal so that its other corner coincides with the edge of the plate.

If you fit two plates together it looks like this:

Respectively for 4 plates:

As a next step, I plan to put magnets on the bottom of the plates so the plates will stick to each other. Currently I have to wait for the magnets, as soon as they arrive, I will report the progress.

If you already have constructed 3 plates, the gluing of the bars is quite easy. You just have to place 3 plates in the shape of an L and fit another plate to them. Now you can simply glue the bars into place.