Detailing of the port!

Finally!

We started with the sea, painted it black... then used thin foam strip to cover the ever-irritating view of wood and foam mix that I looked at for last over 6 months in place of the dock wall. This foam (otherwise known as thermocol) is also going to be the support of my 'real' dock wall!

Now what is the real dock wall? That is the scalescenes.com kit T016. And yes, some amazing kit they have devised! Everything's online, buy it - they will email you the link, download the files, print it (no limit of how many you can print), paste it on suggested cardboard, cut it, paste again the different pieces and there you go... you have a 'A class' paper model with complete (and sometimes overwhelmingly detailed) paper model with just the perfect weathering! And yes, it comes with detailed instruction. I bought some of their other kits also - details of which I will describe later. Oh! by the way, T016 comes with three different options for dock walls - concrete, brick and stone - I chose all three! Concrete for main port section, brick for boat yard and stone for my old coal transfer facility.

Does the above paragraph sound like cakewalk? if so then the next one won't be - after all it's me, how can it be so easy!

My port wall is nearly 1.7 time taller than the kit (1 inch). So I printed it in it's original size, scanned it at best quality, re-sized it in photo editing software, taken a bunch of trial prints, re-sized again... changed the step design... and after a lot of other additional brainstorming, head-scratching and like, this is what I came up with:

Now, I gotta complete the whole port detailing in the coming 4th of July vacation. To end with today, a photo of Sirius:

Water looks good, eh? :)

Cardboard Plate Girder!

Well, the steel bridge was pending for quite a few days now. So last week I started with the rest of the detailing after being annoyed by the fact that I haven't even touched the layout for a few weeks.

Now, the task was not tough, just irritatingly repetitive that requires a lot of patience. I mentioned that I didn't have enough plate girders from the ME kit to cover the entire bridge section and I had to make it out of cardboard. So I did cut two thin and long strips (9mm wide) and a whole lot of 1mm X 9mm thin cardboard strips. Then just started gluing them! How? This is how:

As you can understand from the pictures, these are a little 'heavy duty' plate girder bridges (it was impossible to replicate the ME kit dimension in cardboard anyway). That kind of suits the curved and overtly inclined scenario (and as much as I have researched, makes perfect sense from engineering perspective too). So now the bridge is complete and 'contract' has been given to my wife for painting it! And definitely like all contractors - she is late! (Don't tell her that, she's going to kill me... oh! Look at that - I am using her login to post this... :P)