Having recently completed an ocean battle mat, I’ve been aware of the need to actually build something to use in conjunction with it. Some shore terrain, some little islets, a ship and boats, that sort of thing. Armed with a bag of coffee stirrers and some other bits of wood, some dock/pier structures seemed like an easy starting point that could be cranked out on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

I decided to go with super glue to hold everything together, because of its short dry time relative to PVA and the lack of the stringy mess associated with hot glue. Also, the super glue bottle was right in front of me and the PVA and hot glue were out in the garage, so retrieving them would have forced me to pause the movie I was watching and walk a round trip of nearly thirty feet. So clearly super glue was the only truly viable option.

I hit on the idea of using some packaging foam lying around to try to make jigs to hold the support structures in place while I glued the slats across the top. I started by using a 1″ wide ruler to cut parallel slits in a piece of foam so I could sink support beams into them for simple walkways.

From there it was a simple matter of sliding some craft sticks into place, using a square to get them lined up…

… and cutting short pieces of coffee stirrer across them. (The uneven sides were trimmed off later, and the little space near the middle was where I left room to cut it into two pieces.)

A problem did begin to present itself at this point, however. Where the super glue managed to drop down and contact the foam, it really liked to stick there. Nevertheless I was able to gingerly separate the walkway from the foam without breaking anything,

I added a little extra reinforcing glue on the underside. After trimming down the edges I had a serviceable collection of little wooden walkways.

A funny thing happened on the way to the boardwalk

Next I wanted to build some actual dock structures in 2″x4″ and 4″x4″ sizes. For the pylons I used hardware-store wooden dowel pins of the sort used to hold up shelves in cheap furniture – 1/2″ x 1 1/4″ for the smaller piers and 3/8″ x 2″ for the larger ones.

I took one of the 4″ craft sticks and glued perpendicular scraps to the ends to form a sort of meta-jig to to help jigger my jigs. (Jiggity!)

The idea for the 2x4s would be to have single craft sticks across each side to glue the slats across, while the 4x4s would require a beefier framework. The taller dowel pins allowed for two layers of support beams, so I started with the four supports going across as shown below, and then added four more beams going the opposite way, and the slats were glued to those.

Toothpicks jammed in to hold the beams in place against the dowels while the glue dried.

It was at this point, I assume due to some environmental factor in the room like rising or falling humidity, that the super glue made the conscious (yes, super glue is a living entity unto itself!) decision to start taking hours to dry on wood-to-wood bonds but only seconds to dry on wood-to-foam. My docks kept breaking apart as I tried to extricate them from the jigs, forcing significant re-gluing and damage to the foam. Slats I’d glued on twenty minutes before would slide out of position from the slightest jostle.

Finally I put the jigs aside, rolled out some parchment paper, and switched to the tried-and-true “lay them in place on the desktop, go do something else for a while, and hope the pieces don’t roll while the glue dries” method. Which mostly worked, though the results looked like maybe the city wharf was built by lowest-bid contractors or the mayor’s shady brother-in-law. They didn’t quite sit level (easily fixed with a little sanding), the slats were less well aligned, etc. – but all in all, still believable enough for the tabletop.

I remembered that out in my garage there was an old pint of water-based Minwax stain, where by “old” I mean that I was worried the lid would crumble to powdered rust if I tried to open it. So… sure, it would be worth a try! It turned out to still be a viable stain – a fairly light color whose name I can’t remember, but it colored the wood while leaving the grain visible, which is all I asked of it.

I still want to add some twine wrapped around & hanging off some of the pylons as dock lines, but I keep forgetting to look for twine that would look reasonable at this scale. Even without it, I’ve got a workable set of docks and wharves to set out on my ocean mat next to… er… some rocks or something… in the middle of the sea…