crafting

THIS … is a white square. And it’s also a wonderful, magical, miracle substance. And it’s also ALSO carcinogenic, petroleum-based and non-biodegradable. But hey! We’re hobbyists! We’re tabletop gamers! We’re suckers for new products to spend our ducats on! New toys, new tools, new hobby materials, “these are a few of my favorite things”. Today, I’m wanna introduce you to a fabrication material we used all the time in the Hollywood special effects industry.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we discuss the tabletop gaming hobby while simultaneously capturing footage for an epic time-lapse of your host losing his hair over the next decade. 

All right, let’s talk shop. Hobby shop, that is. 

This YouTube writing. Hey, who green-lit this script? Yeah, I’m talking to myself. Don’t, don’t judge.

THIS … is Sintra. Not the Portuguese town. Although it’s spelled the same. 

Sintra is a brand name for sheets of expanded closed-cell polyvinyl chloride – AKA PVC. That’s right, this is the same stuff that all those pipes under your sink are made of. The expanded PVC, kinda like “foamed” PVC, is extruded in a sheet with a matte finish. 

It’s available in different thicknesses, the most common being 2 mil – that’s 2 millimeters – 3 mil – which is roughly eighth of an inch, and 6 mil, which is about a quarter inch thick. It’s available all the way up to half-inch, but that kind of density is typically only available from industrial supply places where you gotta buy, like, a metric [bark]-ton of it at once.

When I worked in the special fx shop back in the day, we typically had a bunch of 4×8 sheets of quarter inch on hand and a few of the eighth inch, maybe a sheet of the half inch now and then. We’d use it for covering large areas that needed strong support or basing, but we’d also build all kinds of things out of it, from sections of spaceships to rocky cliff forms to nurnies. 

What’s a nurnie? “Nurnies” is a technical term we use to use that has sort of gone away, I think the new nomenclature is “greebles” or “greebling”. Basically random three-dimensional details added to a model to fill in flat spaces or give the illusion of industrial detail, et cetera. The Millennium Falcon is one of the most classic examples of “greebling” or being covered in nurnies. These little details can be harvested from existing model kits or scratch built. 

Yep, most of those super cool surface details on the Millennium Falcon? Just parts swiped from 1970s  race car and World War Two tank kits. It’s probably safe to say that the term “kit bashing” originated in the original ILM model shop. Why make it when you can steal it? 

Now that’s being slightly facetious but yeah, to fabricate all that detail from scratch would have taken waaaay too long and to be fair, there’s a ton of artistry in just arranging and applying those injection-molded parts. 

These techniques were used on almost every spaceship in every movie and tv show since Star Wars, or maybe more accurately since 2001 Space Odyssey. I mean for all I know, probably ealier than that.

But, we’re not here to talk about space ship nurnies, we’re here to talk about Sintra. Which is, in my opinion, an extremely useful hobby material, similar in some ways to balsa and styrene and superior to stuff like card, mdf, and foam core in a lotta ways. Let’s drop some pros and cons and I’ll show you what I like to use it for and what it’s like to work with.

It’s extremely lightweight, but both rigid and flexible, which makes it ideal for uses where it needs to be structural, like walls or bases, et cetera, and it’s good for pieces that might take some punishment. 

It cut-snaps almost as well as styrene, but due to it’s sorta foamed nature, it’s like more “chewy” than styrene, if that makes sense.

It’s three times cheaper than polystyrene when compared at similar thicknesses. It’s also softer and stronger due to that subtle flexibility.

Super glue – aka CA glue – locks it up way tighter than our standard hobby materials like MDF, card, foam or styrene.

It’s lighter, more homogenous, easier to cut, easier to glue and holds a sanded or sculpted edge better than MDF.

It’s way stronger, more versatile, glue-able and water-impervious than either card or foam core.

It can be carved to an extent and it’s easier to score than styrene, mdf, card or balsa wood. And fillers and putties stick right to it.

It’s sand-able. It’s drill-able. It can be cut with hobby knifes and craft blades. You can slice and snap straight lines and you can freehand curves, which is what I do all the time for scatter terrain bases. 

Chop saws, band saws, jewelers saws, jig saws all cut it nicely. I don’t have any of those tools but if I did, I could saw some Sintra. 

And of course your Dremel’ll make short work of it.

You can write on it with a pencil or pen and paint sticks to it as good as anything else. 

And everyone’s favorite: hot glue. Hot glue works great with it. In fact, in the fx industry, we’d use quarter inch Sintra all the time to hot glue up boxes for pouring rubber molds.

This stuff will also make a great base to pour clear resin over. We’ll probably do a video in the future making some ponds or something like that and we’ll use Sintra as the base cause it ain’t gonna warp like card or possibly mdf, and it won’t leak ‘cause super glue and hot glue will seal it up tight. 

“Ignatius, this all sounds great,” I’m hearing you say that. “But what’s the catch? What’re the cons of this wonderful material?” All right, well, there are a couple things to be aware of.

One, this isn’t too much of a con, but it could be in specific circumstances. Sintra feels smooth to the touch but it does have a slight orange peel texture that can be annoying in certain cases. Generally paint will fill this in a bit but it’s something to be aware of if you’re looking for a polystyrene-style slick finish. The cut edges of Sintra do have a pronounced rough texture though, almost like fine-grain foam.

Two, cost. Sintra is marginally more expensive per square inch than foam core, somewhere in the neighborhood of half a cent or so. MDF is around five times cheaper for a similar thickness BUT it’s way more difficult to cut and work with. 

A 6×12 inch piece of 3 mil styrene from Evergreen Plastics – which is a brand most hobby shops stock – runs a little over nine cents a square inch. 

In contrast, most sheets of Sintra run about three cents a square inch. The issue is you usually gotta buy multiple sheets. But then you’ll just have more stuff for more building. 

If you were to, say, laminate sheets of point oh six styrene to make your own eighth inch piece of material, the cost would be almost double and now you have a denser, harder material to work with. And thick styrene is not really available other than through industrial suppliers, and that actually brings us to  

Con number three: availability. This is probably the biggest con for Sintra. It’s readily available online and in some hardware stores, but it’s generally not stocked by hobby shops. Typically nowadays it’s used a lot in sign fabrication. Like signs you get printed for things and like those real estate signs that are on the side of the road, so you can go snag some of those. Get yourself some Sintra. I’m not advocating theft, let’s be clear. It was a joke. You know, they’re out there. All right, we’ll look at a few web sites in a bit where you can get yer greedy hands on it for decent prices, though.

I haven’t really scratch built any structures of my own in my hobby journey so far, but I know the general consensus for the best material to make – say in particular – fantasy type houses – is XPS … expanded polystyrene foam. Or actual foam core with one of the paper layers removed. Because foam presents a very nice surface for scribing or pressing wood or stone texture into. And I love XPS foam, I use it quite a bit for terrain. It’s light, it carves easy, all that good stuff.

But what if you wanted to make a sci-fi building, or a cyberpunk cafe, or a slab-sided military bunker or some other structure with raised, sharp edges – or rounded hard edged details? And you wanted it to be strong. And you want a material easy to work with. Most folks would turn to polystyrene, which is totally fine and works well in a lotta cases. But cost, workability and glue-ability all point to Sintra possibly being a better choice.

Also, this little sci-fi barricade obviously should have been airbrushed and masked for real painting, I just wanted to get some paint on these test pieces so you could see what Sintra’s like after putting some paint down.  

I want to make it clear that I’m not suggesting Sintra as a one to one replacement for polystyrene – or ANY of the other materials we typically use in this hobby. I think using the material you think will work best – or you can get your hands on – for whatever you’re trying to achieve is of course the best way to go, every time. My intention is just to let you know about this other material that you may not have heard of and might be able to add to your arsenal of hobby munitions.

Like, there’s no way Sintra is gonna replace .02 or point naught six millimeter styrene as a detail medium, like when you need something super thin for layering or whatever. But when you need something much thinner and way stronger than a chunk of foam or foam core, easier to work with than MDF and cheaper than styrene, Sintra’s the thing. I don’t know, I could say that a bunch of different ways! Sintra … might be the thing.

So, you can buy single pieces of Sintra from Ebay, Home Depot type stores, and some art stores, but cost will get closer to that of single sheets of polystyrene – but again, that’s a thinner material with different properties.

What I did when I first got back into the hobby and wanted to make some scatter terrain, knowing I’d definitely find projects to use the stuff in, I just made a single bulk order of 3 mil white Sintra – oh, right, you can get Sintra in different colors, which, I guess, is something I should have mentioned earlier. But yeah, I just ordered a box of fifteen 12×24 inch sheets for about $80 and I’ve still got probably 10 of those sheets in the hobby munitions closet. 

So where CAN you buy this stuff? Well, of course, you can just google “sintra pvc” and places will come up. I found three different sites that have good prices, which of course are totally subject to change. I mean, we all live on Earth right? Change is the constant, right? Yes, I’m right. Change is the only thing that’s guaranteed. 

Each of these sites is linked in the description below, the first two, ArtSupply.com and Gatorboard.com are where you can buy 10 packs or 15 packs of custom-sized sheets and thicknesses and the Amazon link is to a single two foot by four foot sheet. Of course you know shipping costs are gonna vary depending on where you live and whenever you place an order, but you can find plenty of places to buy a single sheet if you just wanna test it out. I got this chunk of quarter inch black Sintra and this three mil red Sintra on Ebay.

Now if you have a pack of Sintra board stashed away, you’ll all of a sudden just be able to start making stuff whenever. Instead of like buying a bunch of MDF discs to put your miniature trees on, you can cut out some random curvy shapes and put them trees on that instead. You can bevel the edge so minis will stand on the edge of the terrain and the pieces blend into the tabletop a little better.

Or if you need a cyberpunk sci-fi barricade wall, you can scratch build something with rounded corners and scribed details and you can drop it a few times and it’s all good.

So, there you go, that’s my Sintra video. Never say I don’t over-share. I’m good at over-sharing. And nope, I don’t know what that means. 

’Til next time, go build something! See ya!