building

An engaging build, part 1

Fraternal Republic of Utraijnia recently take great pride in celebrating royal engagement of Prince Mikhail Douglaski and Rahela Annushka. Special steam train make maiden voyage to glorious fan fare!

Here we see the steam train special posed at the station as the royal party disembark. Many Utrainian residents drove considerable distances to attend the celebrations, for the steam train was a very notable event; not only was it the royal-proposal-train, but it was also the first train to ever run on the real (model) Utrainia.

The new terminus of Utrainia is now Raparapa, which is a portmanteau of "Wairarapa" and Rachel's initials, R A P. I built the village of Raparapa in order to propose to Rachel, a task it achieved most splendidly!

I tried to remem...

Installing the rockfall shelter portals

The rockfall shelter is continuing nicely. Yesterday I spent some time cutting slots in the rock to accept the end walls of the shelter. This involved lots of slow sawing with a broken hacksaw blade, and lots of plaster dust everywhere.

Today I did a test fit and all went well. So I mixed up some "super concrete" which is pre-mixed patching plaster and PVA. The PVA makes it stickier and easier more pliable. I filled the slots with a generous helping and then pushed the portals into it. Hopefully when the plaster dries the PVA will help hold the portals in place. Any gaps I carefully filled with my "super concrete", and I added a good thing seam to the inside edges.

A machinist's square helped keep things nice and square, and a selection of overly large wagons helped check clearances.

Rockfall shelter progress

Some more progress on my canyon scene. The rockfall shelter is the focus of my attention this time. During the week I used some premixed plaster to make little foundations for each leg of the shelter. With the shelter roughly in place it was time to make some ends for it. I made a rough pattern out of cardboard and then made a matching mold. Poured some plaster, strengthened it with some balsa splints, and clamped it between two plates of glass.

I then did the opposite for the other end of the shelter.

While studying some photos of the prototype I noticed how uniformly coloured the scenery was, so while waiting for that to dry I started working on blending the rocks into the rest of the scenery. I'm trailing using a medium-gray base coat on the scenery that I'm dry bushing...

Rock progress

Been a bit quiet here in Utrainia for the last month or so. With good reason however, as my CNC machine has been taking up all my time. I am hoping that once I have ironed out the bugs it will be both accurate and powerful enough to help make many of my models. I can design them upstairs in comfort, and then "print" them out on the machine, which will then carve them out before my very eyes. Currently there is still a bit of work to do on it, and I'm waiting on a few final components.

In the meantime, I have resumed work on my canyon scene. I have finally finished carving all the rocks, after a couple of additional weekends work carving away. Now it is time to move on to more exciting stages, as I stain all the rocks.

Rockfall shelter progress

I did more rock carving on Sunday, but soon got a bit bored of that. It's a pretty slow and tedious process, although it's really starting to look the part now.

I decided instead to tackle the rock shelter. My masters had dried by now and were ready to be turned into molds.

Step one is to attach the masters to a smooth base, and build a fence around them. I'm making these molds upside-down, so the flat surface at the bottom will become the top where I pour in the resin. These are just simple one-piece molds.

The fences are cardboard, hot glued in position. As long as it's water tight that is all that matters.

Step 2 is to mix up some silicone. I have some highly accurate jeweler's scales which I use to measure out the precise ratios, and a 100 pa...

Rocking rocks

Well the queen of Utrainia is away for the weekend, which means it's back to bachelor living for me and the cat, and the bulk of the weekend has been spent in the garage, bag of plaster in one hand, empty pizza boxes in the other!

During the week I went on a collection trip up the road to get some suitable soil. I tried to turn this soil into a clay-coloured paste to cover the raw polystyrene, but instead I just made mud. Mistake #1!

Correcting this mistake, I made a new paste consisting of: "Deck and Pave Grip" (very very fine sand), acrylic modeling paste, water. Mixing these together made a nice gritty paste that I used to cover the polystyrene and blend the rocks into the scene. This worked well.

I then glued the first tunnel into position and filled behind it with boulders. The boulders were easily made: take one zip lock bag, some old plaster castings and a hammer. Put plaster in bag, seal, bash. When done you should have a good variety of plaster rocks.