Monday, August 19, 2013

Time for some shingles!


Terrain week. House.  Then another house.  Balsa wood.  Foam, Glue.


Raise the roof!!!!!!!!!!!!!


This time...  chimney.  An improvement over early attempts over a year ago.


Putting wood planks on the sides of the house.


And the roof.  Cereal box time!  And more balsa wood.


2.5 hours later... roof!


Once all the glue dried, this darn thing was really strong!!!


But wait... that was just the sample!


More shingles.  But this time, made out of cereal boxes. :-)  Conservation is key!  Very green, as in saving my wallet.


Some Oxide Paste for additional texture and strength.


A monumental task


Just as it was with the basing, terrain just took over.  It required such a vastly different setup, it took many hours to get everything in place.


This image is a bit of an illustration as to why I had to remake this monument for the video.  The original monument on the left is at least five inches TALLER than what you can see in this image!


So, I had to redo that, scaling it down by measuring what the camera would be able to show in the actual setup.  Also, it turned out that due to waiting for things like glue and oxide paste to dry, I needed to make even MORE of them.


Unlike paint, one does not simply take a hair dryer to soft foam to make it dry when you want!  Here we have the Obelisks...


And now the Mayan Totem.  Reworked to fit the screen, and be much easier to handle.


In that time where I waited for things to dry, I had done some prefabricated pieces on the next demonstration in line to use that time as best as possible.


I only went so far with that, since I did want to show some of the cuts.


I figured that people would get very bored very quickly if all I showed was me making the same cuts 16, 32 or 64 times! :-)  That was another reason to fast forward in that manner.


My blue painter's tape is always a critical ally when gluing foam!


Super sharp brand new blade to cut my snakes on a pole...


Glued in place.


Sand and gravel, and Voila!


But wait, there's more!  Oxide paste to fill gaps, add texture and even strength to the joints and connections.