Sanatorium progress - the final sprint

The saga of the Sanatorium continues...

More sanding, more painting

Just when I thought I'd done enough, I had still more painting and sanding to do! The final stage of it though. After sanding everything smooth I had to paint the top black to prevent any light seeping through.

You can see that, for some reason, the bits that I filled with baby-epoxy-powder have a different look to those that are just styrene!? Easily fixed with a few more coats of white, finished off with some white Vallejo acrylic airbrushed on for a nice uniform finish. End result is very smooth and white looking!

More filling

More?! I needed some spacers to go between the two layers of the building, which I quickly fashioned out of woof and then spent a few days cleaning up. More filler, more painting.

Connecting the towers

Because the building isn't already fiddly enough, I decided to make clear connecting bridges between the lift shafts (PVC pipes) and the rings of rooms. I made up some molds on my CNC machine from machinable was and soon had a set of accurately shaped joiners; something the CNC machine is very good at. I painted them white and then cut out clear styrene to mate them to.

And mated to the PVC pipe:

This is where things get really fun; PVC pipe, urethane resin, and clear styrene all prefer different glues. CA will cloud the styrene, but regular cement won't stick to PVC pipe, the special clear-safe glue barely sticks to the styrene anyway, and styrene cement won't bond to urethan resin!! So mostly it is held on with good luck. This is about the time it started to become known throughout the house as The Insanatorium.

Putting it all together

Eventually though it all started to come together. First the floors were glued together... incorrectly the first time, but rectified the second time:

Then the towers were added:

I think I raided every single secret rubber band stash in the house. My mini clothes pegs came in very handy too for holding bands in place.

Somewhere amongst all this gluing I remembered to drill holes for the wires. Before I glued the whole thing together for good I made sure to check the lights worked. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, writing the 10 line Arduino program to test the lights took a whole day, what with USB permission issues and 32/64 bit incompatibilities. Eventually though I got a multicoloured rainbow Knightrider/Cylon sequence to play out over all the LEDs, and so the glueing could continue.

And then, suddenly, it was all done!