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If you make it out of a soft enough material it works. I use pantyhose that I stretched and taped down before spray painting a base color. Then lightly paint over it and it's stiff enough to form but not break. Certainly adds the the PaKs I use (although it's 15mm).

I would recommend using etched brass mesh. You can usually find it in train hobby shops. It comes in different size mesh holes so you can pick what looks best to you. You can cut it with scissors so no special tools required. Its rigid but malleable so you can bend it to whatever shape you want. And because its mesh you can put camo colored string through it to look like camo netting - i use embroidery floss.

Paul

Paul,
Is embroidery floss different than the etched brass mesh?
Still recommend that vs. cutting panty hose and painting that?

I have been thinking of using the bug mesh they use on tents. You can get a mesh tent repair kit for $5.00 at REI or other outfitter. You should be able to thread some brown, green and forest green yard to get an actual pattern.

This is prob one of the truly difficult things to bring off in our scale , until some one comes out with a truly micro mesh fabric ....Ill just stick to ground level cammo....

I used a bandage from a First Aid kit and cut strips from that, painted it camo and used that. Seemed to work.

BattlerBritain,
Do you have any pics of your band-aid gauze as a camo net. I have some, it is too tight of a weave with what I have.
I will also try tent mesh repair kit.

If you can find it, pure silk gauze like the stuff used to make wedding veils is excellent. It keeps its shape after being wet (and adding some white glue to the water makes it permanent), and it comes in a range of thread-counts. It takes colour washes and stains exceptionally well too, as anyone who's ever dined out in a silk shirt can attest.

The trick is to make sure that what you're getting is actually silk, and not rayon or nylon or something similar masquerading as silk.

chrisswim: try this link to a post I made ages ago about the camo nets I made:
http://www.ghqmodels.com/forum/viewtopi ... 03mm#17107

Hope this helps,

B

I sent off for a particular material to try as cam netting. Got it today and had a play, posting results here...

First off, what are we representing? For the WW2 Western Allies there are simple cloth, 'cheese cloth', 'shrimp net' and more familiar open cam netting with the scrim woven through it. The scrim type nets had rolls of coloured fabric available to use, and these were 2" wide strips, making the open area of the net about 5 or 6 inches (anywhere between 0.35 and 0.5mm).
For the Germans I have a photo reference of cam netting on a half track, and the open area looks to be about 6" or so (say 0.5 to 0.8mm).

What I ordered was a phosphor bronze woven wire mesh. To scale, the 'ropes' are about 3/4 inch thick, and the open areas about 1 1/2 inches or so... so approximating the 'shrimp net' type of thing which was a general issue item. 2 A4 sheets of this stuff cost me $20 including airmail P&H from the UK to Australia, so relatively cheap. I went with phosphor bronze because I'm familiar with the material. You'll see why in a minute.



OK, the shiny yellow square is the actual product. This is a scale 20' x 20' shrimp net. Although brass is quite soft, phosphor bronze is softer, but I still needed to anneal the mesh to shape it. I did that over a gas burner on the stove... just heat it evenly until it is just glowing red, then drop it in water. It becomes VERY malleable after that. I pressed it onto an unpainted M10 Achilles to cover it (that one is a 30' x 30' cover, also an issue size). Once shaped, I painted it. So as not to fill the open areas I added a lot of thinners. As you can see, the flash from the camera is bouncing back from the silver of the unpainted model, only a little from the bronze mesh. You can also see how easily it folds into shapes and holds them.



A secondary observation; notice the two threads loose at bottom? They are crimped as a part of the weaving process and look like a potential source for 'cat's cradle' wire entanglements.

I'm going to try different meshes, including the etched mesh suggested, although that looks a lot more expensive, and the smallest opening I've seen is 1mm (or 12" approx) which is a bit out of scale, and they don't say how big the sheet is!

The company I went through is called The Mesh Company and are based in the UK.

Looks pretty good to me

Nice one!

Any bronze showing through seems a bit 'brown' some it comes with built-in dirt. It may need a matt varnish though, to avoid any metallic shiny-ness?

Cheers,

B

Yeah, this was literally a 10 minute experiment to see how the stuff handles. The very thinned paint is also quite weak, so some kind of varnish may be necessary once finished. Would also help to hold any flocking added for effect.

Another aspect of the bronze, after the annealing process, is that it will oxidize and turn all sorts of colours depending on environment. Dip it in vinegar and it will turn blue green. I think it has good potential as a material, but that best processes are yet to be determined!

.post

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