Building Palm Tree Stands

 This week I base up some plastic coconut palm trees by Nolux for my sand table.

Tools Needed. (Not pictured: I also used the same flock as the desert table.)

There are some really nice miniature trees available on Amazon these days. I received a nice set of these from my amazing wife for my birthday.

Checking the depth of the taproot

Like many miniature trees, these did not come with a flat bottom for gaming, but rather a taproot for placing into railroad layouts (and birthday cakes?). To make them movable and standing, I made bases using thick hardboard. I made sure the hardboard was about as thick as the taproot is long, which ended up being the closest at 1/4 inch thick. This hefty board also makes the bases heavy enough to be stable with the tall trees on them.

Not at all gratuitous photo with different minis. For (ahem) scale purposes (ahem).

I checked the trees in the pack to see how well they scaled with the different sized figures in my collection. The middle sizes work with everything, and I can generally get away with the smallest, but the tallest trees are a bit big for 15mm.
The trees themselves only required a little bit of cleanup, including the removal of the coconuts from the smaller trees, since it put them out of scale.

Yes, I cheated: this is not my coping saw.

I did some quick math and figured that I would probably like to do 2-3 trees for most of the bases, and the 15 of the pack would have 8 stands. After 10 minutes of hard sawing, I put down my coping saw and grabbed the jigsaw, which made much shorter work of the 1/4 inch board. I then used a power sander to bevel and round the edges.

(NOTE: I later remembered my jigsaw can change the pitch of its blade. Beveling with the cut saves a LOT of sanding.)

Next I set out my cut bases and allocated the trees. Based on the scale test, I decided that the tallest trees would be based alone. This allows them to be easily omitted on 15mm scale games, since they appear just a bit too big.

I drilled holes the same diameter as the taproots into the bases, then turned the stands over and counter drilled about 1/16 inch back with a larger drill bit

After I super glued the trees to their holes, I took a nail and gripped it in a pair of vice grips. Then I heated the nail with a lighter.

I used the hot nail head to flatten down the extra length of the taproot into the larger hole I drilled. Essentially it became its own rivet.

The last steps were to apply sand, paint, and flock to the bases using the same materials and processes seen here. I also added a quick wash to each tree using Sepia and Nuln Oil inks. I only managed two stands complete this weekend as sanding took a few hours more than expected. I need to finish sanding about 4 more bases before I can complete the project, but at least I have some good results to show for myself on the first few.

Tank for... um... let's say "Scale"