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Ranuska scenery

With the sanatorium complete, attention is moving to the quaint seaside settlement of Ranuska...

It's no secret that I love doing scenery, and I've been making good progress this week. Here is a before shot from last Saturday:

First of all I had to build up the contours a bit to make the landscape a bit more believable. A block of polystyrene was soon sculpted into a crude shape.

Three buildings, each on its own level.

One of the things I've struggled with in the past is attaching my buildings to the scenery....

A home for the sanatorium

The saga of the Sanatorium continues...

It's funny, but after months of stop-start progress getting the sanatorium completed, I am not on fire and have achieved more in a few days than I have in months!

First up were some holes for the lift towers. Luckily I had a hole cutter that was just a few mm bigger than I needed. It made short work of the plaster shell / polystyrene core scenery. Then I was able to gingerly lower it into position and admire the result:

Wow!

The holes were miles too deep, so I made up packers to raise them back to the right height. Once the spirit level was happy I wrapped the tubes in masking tape and made up some sculptamold to fill in the around them.

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!

Sanatorium progress - the end is nigh!

The saga of the Sanatorium continues...

Quietly over the last few months I've been plodding away on the insanitorium. In the month of July, I clamped one of the layers to my CNC machine and very slowly cut out a circle. My CNC machine isn't really cut out for machine wood, and so it was a slow and noisy process.

Despite pinning it to the bench, the piece kept breaking free or otherwise moving. After that I invented a better method of clamping the Dremel to a saw horse and pivoting the workpiece at the right radius; made the job much quicker!

After that I proceeded to, in a series of fits and starts, build more of the cursed thing over the coming months. The typical process was: stare at it for a month; do three hours work on...

Breaking news

Hot off the press: the sanatorium lives!

Yes, after 9 months of work, the sanatorium is complete enough to move into its final spot on Ranuska. When I started this project, the Druzhba Sanatorium was still a part of Ukraine. Now, it is administered by Russia as part of the Republic of Crimea. I didn't think it would take that long to build.

So, watch this space.

New loco: Kato DD16

I always get excited about new arrivals to the roster. The latest new loco to join Utrainia is Kato 7013, a model of the DD16 diesel locomotive. This was developed by JNR to replace light weight steam locos, and is has an axle loading 12 tons, total weight 48 tons. It has a diesel hydraulic transmission, as is common in Japan, with a maximum speed of 75km/h and length of 11.8m.

In other words, it is a very small loco. I had seen it listed online and it immediately appealed, however I was too slow to buy it and it sold out! So I placed my name on the waiting list at Hobby Search, and a couple of months ago I received an email alerting me that more had come in. I ordered one that night and it arrived a week later in a well padded box from Japan.