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Sand Bags |
| 2026-01-28 |
Sand Bags
I needed and still need sandbags. The first videos I found taught me how to make them out of milliput, that must be expensive and the context was that of a diorama. Then I found a video telling how to make them out of folded hard paper bathing in PVA glue (need to try that)... The final video, the winner, was about making them out of air dry clay.
My first forays were tedious, it was self-inflicted, I was not following the video. I tried to make a 3d-printed gutter for easy cutting... The clay was sticking to it. In my second try, I limited myself to the silicone mat and made the long cylinder and cut it, with the spear tool I had found. That spear being pointy but not very sharpy, the cutting was not great, and with wet fingers, the bit almost torn away by the spear was shapen back into the bag. The point of the tool was used to draw the lateral sewing. It was time-consuming, but ok.
I was producing fifteen bags per sitting. It's not much, a single layer of the outer "v" of a trench hex taking around twenty bags...
Then I hit cruise speed by just drawing out my Swiss Army Knife. It is sharp, it make definite cuts. Then with fingers barely wet, I simply squeezed the bag into shape, left sewing line, small vertical line at the bottom, mirror on the other side. I was making thirty bags per sitting.
My first, wetter method, was taking two days to dry. My cruise speed method only takes a single night to dry. I can make two-hundred bags a day (half a jam glass jar). Wet fingers are only good for the initial clay cylinder making, after having cut into segments, wet fingers bring disservice.
I prepare many such small pieces (bags, trench posts, corrugated sheets, boards, ...) in repetitive sittings, they let me do the trench hex assembly sitting in one go, no need to set aside to prepare any missing small pieces. It feels like playing lego (not making legos).
My sand bags look a bit like those paper cement bags left under the rain. They are a bit big for a 1/56 scale, but it will do. They are satisfying to make too.
