Happy new year

Happy new year! December was a wash with nothing being achieved before we flew down to Christchurch for xmas. I did however get a little bit of modelling in while I was away, having a bit of fun with the Jörgen Edgar technique for making N scale locomotives quickly. And come Christmas day, I was pretty spoilt with models, kitsets, people, tools, and even books. So no complaints here!

Ranuska scenery

Ranuska is coming along well. I have made an executive decision not to use the "tall skinny house", it just didn't seem to fit with everything else. It will be used elsewhere I am sure though. Instead I have turned the area into a small overgrown park.

Just need to add a picnic table or two and maybe some raco...

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.