File this one under “I wish I’d thought of this before I made a giant pile of dungeon tiles with wood floors on one side”: I mentioned in a previous post that I’d used a comb-like brush cleaning tool to draw parallel lines in foam to demarcate the slats of a wooden door. I also mentioned I was considering buying another one and pulling out a few tines for drawing bigger boards.

I happened to be at Home Despot today, so I grabbed another one. I’d first noticed them there and gotten the idea a few weeks before while standing around the paint department waiting for them to re-open the next aisle where a forklift was lowering something off the top shelf. The model I got was this one, $3.50 at HD and for some reason almost double that on Amazon if you can’t find it locally. Other brands will probably work just as well, but depending on how they’re constructed they might be easier or harder to modify.

To remove tines on the new one I started out by bending them away from their neighbors with needle-nose pliers, intending to clip them off afterward. But as I bent them I noticed they twisted in place easily, so I tried giving them a good yank – and a bit of force pulled them out cleanly with no problem.

I created a couple of example strips out of some scrap foam and added a bit of dark wash to make the lines more visible. Obviously brushing for wood grain texture, followed by painting, would look a lot better – this is just to show what I was able to accomplish in essentially just a few seconds, vs measuring and lining up a straight edge to draw lines over and over and getting the last one a little obviously crooked…