building

Canyon progress

Progress on the Thompson River Canyon has been steady this week. Last Sunday I only had a couple of blocks of polystyrene, but over the last few evenings I've fleshed this out into many layers of sculpted polystyrene, and added some tracks.

Working closely from reference photos of the area, I used a saw and craft knife to roughly shape the foam, then a SurForm tool to grind off the rough edges. Then I worked the foam with a knife, breaking off chunks to form rock faces. I used the saw blade to scrape over the surface and add more texture. By the end of the second night I had this:

The last couple of days I have been fillin in the joins between layers with some lightweight spackling compound (Red Devil brand). I have no idea what spackle is, or what it is mad...

Polystyrene Day

Work on the viaduct continues at a snail's pace, however this weekend the Utrainia Engineering dept were proud to erect two out of the four (yes, it's growing) bridge towers. One is going to be the full 100 feet height, the other has a sloping base to accomodate the steep valley floor.

To the right you can see the beige bridge girders, produced on-site from patterns taken from the masters. The two remaining towers still need to be produced, and for these Management has grudgingly conceded that two more tower kits shall need to be ordered in from overseas. The paperwork is currently pending with the government paper-pushers.

Meanwhile, the civil engineering forces have been a little more productive. The base for the viaduct scene has been triangulated and is now very sturdy, so construction can move into the polystyrene phase.

Workbench update

What's been happening in Utrainia this week?

Corner module #1

After making the skeleton of the first corner module in record time, I ran into a bit of a road block with the bridge. I realised that it was too short and too tall, and would take a bit of work to get it curved. What I really needed was an extra bridge tower to make the chasm sides a bit less steep.

So rather than just biting the bullet, ordering an extra span and waiting a couple of weeks for it to arrive, I decided I would make my own. The girders were easily cast, however the A frames for the bridge towers were a different story. I had to make a two part mold, and then inject the resin in at one end, using a combination of gravity and pressure to distribute it throughout the mold. Second attempt went reasonably well, good enough for my purposes:

A lot of flashing to clean up, and a fe...

Utrainia is expanding

Now that the prairie scene is more or less finished, it's time for Utrainia to expand. Since every module so far has been a straight line, I decided it was time to make a corner module.

So this morning I jumped on the computer, fired up Inventor and started sketching out a track centreline and the module boundaries. The great thing about Inventor is that it's parametric, so you can define relationships between things, such as "these two lines need to be parallel, at 45° to everything else, and 300mm apart. You can then drag things around until everything lines up.

So plan in hand I went down to the workshop and started chopping my timber.

A couple of hours later and I had the ends made up: