Stone, Fire and Wood!

Several bits of terrain progress going on at the moment...

The ongoing saga of the Causeway board... I have added several rocky ledges and levels to allow goblins to scale the walls in various scenarios...

And have 'dwarfed up' the goblins shooting gallery, with pillars and trim...

Up next will be adding the flame effects in the base of the board....

I have made some flame makers made from clear plastic sheet - the sort you get from the typical plastic clam/ blister packs many goods come in these days, or even using a sheet made from laminating sheet off cuts...

Cut out a circle with a wedge piece cut out then glued it up into a cone shape. Then added more cut spiky pieces as flames and glued these on top. Then covered the whole thing in Woodland Scenics Water Effect. And then painted using GW yellow ink and orange ink....

I then considered the lighting of these... I was going to use several LED bulbs wired together, but I don't think I will get enough intensity to light up the whole flame-effect piece sufficiently... so I went to the local electrical store, and had a chat there about what I needed. I came away with 4 of these LED light units.

They are small, compact and cool running, mains power plug-in type. So they will fit under the board and not cause any heat problems and have enough intensity to light up the flame-effect piece... I think I am still going to need to build up the thickness of the base board to fit these, but that should not be too difficult...

Reduced from NZ$75 each to NZ$25 each... not bad I thought...

So once positioned underneath the the flame effect piece, I am hoping they will look something like this:

This was done sitting the flame effect piece on top of the upturned energy bulb (equiv 60W) of my angle poise desk lamp... Quite nice I thought... I will glue on top lots of black sprayed 'filter floss medium' to effect black smoke rising above...

So that's the Causeway board progressing...

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You may recall I moaned recently about my mini disaster using the Woodland scenics tree kits? Well I managed to salvage them and got them based up, gluing 4-5 trees per piece of MDF base... So they worked out OK in the end... though I must admit, the 'tree kit', to my mind did not come with enough clump foliage to cover all the tree armatures provided... In the picture below the darker trees were done using the kit... the lighter ones I had to finish with spare clump material that I had, even though it was a lighter shade.  Still it makes for a more pleasing effect I think with the varying colours together...

Woodland Scenics pine trees

Staying with trees I have been looking at other ways of making trees and came a cross a useful site detailing rubberised horsehair. I have seen trees made using this before, and they look rather good, so thought I'd give it a try... only problem was I couldn't find an NZ based supplier, so had to order online from a UK supplier...

Here's what I got...

So just need to break it up into pieces and glue it to some garden twigs to make the basic tree, then flock the horsehair...

Of course I couldn't resist playing about ... 'Instant Treebeard'... just add idiot! ;-)

Stay tuned for more, if I can regain my sanity!

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PS I'm on holiday at the moment so haven't been perusing blogs as usual, I'll try and catch up next week... Cheers all,
Scott

Victorian Terrace #2, WIP9 - LED lighting, Curtains and base.

With the long weekend here in NZ, I had three days, in which to make some more progress...

First job was to ready the lighting rig; 20 twinkle effect yellow LEDs, wired together in a parallel circuit, so only one resistor was needed, which was wired in first to the positive terminal of the twin D size battery holder.

Lighting rig.

The lighting rig was then hot glued to a piece of MDF cut to fit the internal shape of the house, with 10 lights to either side. Another piece of MDF went across the top, so the battery holder could be placed in the roof void.

Lights and battery holder

Prior to installing the lights, I had put up the curtains. I found a supply of white material that would do for a net curtain effect, glued into place, over the lower half of each window. Then strips of material were glued in to effect curtains (handy having a mother-in-law who sews, and has an endless supply...)

Lighting and Curtains.

So with curtains fitted, and lighting in place; a quick picture. Not much to see in daylight;

...but with the lights out,  the effect is quite pleasing; imagine these twinkling...

Night time lighting effect

Th last thing over the weekend, with the internals complete, was to add the perimeter pavement. Another piece of MDF. This will be clad with DAS clay, and a paving slab pattern etched in...

MDF pavement perimeter added

Also over the weekend, to get us in the mood for some Victorian era drama, I downloaded the Dracula sound track from ITunes...

... so we could have it playing, while playing Fury of Dracula, with my son Chris. Great fun :-)

Victory went to the Count! I vant to byte you neck, blah blah blah,...a little bit of Hotel Transylvania there too!... ;-)

Next up for the house, once pavement done, will be to add the Gaslamps, wire those in, add chimney pots, gutters and drain pipes and paint the whole thing... Nearly done now.

Victorian Terrace - WIP 13 - building finished, painting to go...

More work on the Victorian terrace over the last couple of weeks... its good having several projects on the go at once, as whenever you get bored with one, you can do a bit on something else... of course this tends to make you spread your stuff out all over the house! Just make sure you don't upset SWMBO! Dining room tables and kitchen breakfast bars are usually no go areas! ;-)

Plus while the glue or paint on one project is drying, you can be working on something else...

Anyway enough waffle, on with the pics...

First up I finished tiling the roof - thank the Gods for that! Once dry, I glued on the capping ridge.

I then based the building on a sheet of 3mm MDF, to give a pavement width around the front and two sides, but leaving the rear yard wall straight on to alley way. I left a hole underneath to be able to access internal lighting should the need arise.. I clad the MDF pavement in DAS clay again and etched in a pavement pattern.

With the roof done, I added gutters and drain pipes using plastic strut... they are not glued together though as the roof remains lift off for access to batteries for the internal lights...

With building now on a base, I could complete the rear yards, giving them a simple sand surface. More card tiles effected a pathway to rear gate.

The last bit to do is to add the LED gaslamp street lights. I have yet to wire these in to the main house circuit, but am pondering leaving till after painting as I have a feeling they will get in the way, and probably knocked off by accident, during the paint job...

So that's construction complete, just painting left to do... after that I hope to find some suitable Victorian advert bill posters that I can stick on the gable ends of the building to finish the effect... and then perhaps some general junk and detritus to make the rear yards look interesting....

Victorian terrace - WIP 11 - Lights at Night...

In the prior post you saw a quick video of the lights after first being rigged up... I was, as you can imagine, quite thrilled I'd got them all working and in position. Afterall, it has been over 25 years since I last played about with basic electronic circuits, in my school days. But the one thing I could remember was Ohms Law, which in my head was V=IR. Thankfully as well, I found several helpful pages on the internet.
This was particularly helpful...

http://electronicsclub.info/leds.htm
 

 However looking at the lights twinkling in the building again, I realised a lot of the lighting effect was too 'direct'.

The LEDs give the majority of their lighting directly straight out the 'top' of the LED, with little from a sideways view.

So this morning, I slightly bent back the LEDs so they were not pointing directly out the windows. This time the lighting is far more subtle, giving more a background glow to the windows, which was the effect I was after.

You can see the effect quite nicely in the dark...

Now I am happy to press on with the roof and painting...

A couple of quick pics for Monty... the internal rigging... not pretty but you don't see it from the outside ...

view from the underside

view from the top

Victorian Terrace - WIP9 - Let there be light! .....

With the main house building work completed, it was time to turn attention to the lighting. Having seen first hand the great effect Joe has had with his VSF mega walker project, I knew the same lighting effect would be perfect for my house...so thanks to Joe, I sourced the twinkle effect LEDs and resistors from Evil Mad Scientist in the US (great name for a hobby supplies company), and got hold of some basic components for the rest of the wiring from a local supplier...

So, ... the scene is set...

The first few bulbs connected, in a simple parallel circuit...

A couple of hours on a Saturday arvo, and the 20 LEDs are wired and working...

... who is that Evil Mad Scientist,  with a twinkle in his eye...???  ;-)

I now just have to figure out how best to get the lighting rig in the house!