Petite Infanterie: How to make your own mini barbed wire

Basic idea behind the mini barbed wire

Mini barbed wire is always an interesting accessory in any war gaming theater.

We can find many very good tutorials on how to make mini barbed wire on the web. Unfortunately, most of them use actual wire to build the miniature mini barbed wire. It looks more realistic in a diorama but it does have a down side. I tried that technique and I ended up having my mini barbed wire all entangled the second time I used it.

What I propose is an easy way of building a mini barbed wire network. It’s very fast to do and very fast to deploy on the field. Considering that I use pickets to hold everything in place, some can argue that those mini barbed wire are more a “WWI” type. I cannot disagree with them!

Material required to make the mini barbed wire

To be able to build our mini barbed wire, we will need the following material:

- - Plastic netting like the one use to package vegetables at the grocery store

- - Grey and silver paints

- - Press wood board or Styrofoam board

- - Bamboo skewer

- - Hot clue

The useful tools for the work are:

- Glue gun

- Pair of scissor

- Cutter

- Paint brush

Assembly technique of the mini barbed wire

Step one: prepare the mini barbed wire itself

Any plastic netting can be used. Ideally, choose the elastic ones. There are some which are “not elastic” and they will not give the barbed wire look.

That type of netting is not suitable to do barbwire

This is the type to choose

The plastic netting could be difficult to unfold. The best is to cut open the net and then use an iron to straight it. To avoid to have melted plastic on your iron, put the temperature at the lowest and place your plastic net between two sheets of waxed paper. Just iron it like any piece of clothing.

Step two: paint the mini barbed wire

To get the steel color of the mini barbed wire, we must paint the netting with a silver paint. Don’t worry if there is some uncolored parts, it will add to the realism of your mini barbed wire.

Step three: prepare the pickets which hold the mini barbed wire

Barbed wire is not a fence. Your mini barbed wire should not stand like it. It can loosely hold in place. Ideally, poles holding the barbed wire should be thin as possible. Personally, I use mini bamboo skewer. Those are a little bit out of scale but it gives a better stability to your wire. The base in which the pole is fixed can be either foam board or wood board. I prefer the latter because the weight of the materiel avoids the mini barbed wire to type over.