Printing Full Fan-Made Boards

[torilen]

I hope I'm not being redundant here, but I have downloaded a couple of the fan-made boards.
I have no idea how one would print and use one of those. Anyone have any suggestions?
At home?

How about professional printing? Does anyone know a company (I'm in Virginia, USA) that might be
able to print something like that...maybe even on poster board or some other heavy-duty material
so that it could be used for gaming.

Thanks for any info on this.

[tasoe]

Allow me to present my recently home-made board.
I recently printed out an HQ board. I printed it at home on 12 A4 sheets of paper.
I used quick printing on my printer to save on ink so it's not very colourful.
I glued the sheets on a large piece of wood I had lying in the basement, covered it with the transparent protective stuff that's widely used on books and the result is this:



The squares are 9 square cms and large enough to hold even 25mm square bases and the whole board is roughly 80x58 cms.
The piece of wood has 0.8cm thickness so it's a bit heavy but also very flat and unbendable.

I guess you could print those new boards you have and glue them on a piece of strong cardboard of a refrigerator box or something. The cost is very low, cannot be calculated exactly cause of the ink, and the result looks nice.

[torilen]

That is nice looking. When you pulled the graphic up, did your printer offer the option of printing
on separate sheets, or is this something all printers automatically do? I'm very unfamiliar with
printing anything larger than normal 8x11 letter-sized sheets.

The reason I'm asking - I'm thinking about printing some of this stuff as a personal birthday present
later this year...just on the off chance I ever get to play again, or when my kids get old enough to
try and play with them.

[Sjeng]

I printed mine on 4 sheets of A3 paper, full colour. If you tell the printer to split the image over 4 sheets ("poster") and set paper size to A3, then it will divide the image for you. This depends on the type of printer driver of course.
But fitting a map to 4xA3 (=A1) is large enough. It'll be roughly 2.5cm per square.

[Big Bene]

If your printer driver doesn't support this, or you have difficulties to do it this way, just import the graphic in Excel. It will manage the printing over several sheets.

[Maike05]

Nice thread, shold post on the blog!

[Fimm McCool]

Here's my home-printed board at the Oldhammer community's Bring Out Your Lead last weekend. Well, printed on a laser-cutter and hand coloured! Based on a jpg of the scanned board with a few extra squares and altered room textures.

[Goblin-King]

Wow! That board looks spectacular! I never realized "laser-cutting" was a thing. This knowledge opens up whole new doors.

More pictures please!

[Fimm McCool]

I have a love-hate relationship with the laser cutter...




Didn't get the best pictures, was too busy GMing, one of the players got some good shots though:
http://www.lead-rising.com/2014/08/oldhammer-aftermath.html

[Goblin-King]

How does it even work? Does it cut according to darkness of a picture, or do you have to design a 3D surface or what?