Monday 9 July 2018

Another distraction

In my last post I referred to a couple of distractions from my usual modelling plans, this is the second one.

Having helped me with exhibiting my layouts for the last few years, my son has been saying for a while that he wanted to build his own 009 layout that could be taken to exhibitions, a small layout like the EXPO challenges. Then he found out about the Dave Brewer challenge for this year's EXPO-NG show, which is to build a layout 50cm by 35cm, and decided that he was going to build a layout to enter.

Of course what that means is that he is going to get me to help him build the layout, including advice and doing anything he deems too tricky, so the result will be a bit of a joint effort. However that does leave us a challenge in simply making the time to work on it - there's not a lot that Joshua could do without supervision, and I'm not doing anything without him.

2018-01-17 20.10.24

We've been working on it for a few months now, but I'll rewind the story to the planning stage. This was mostly done full-size on a piece of lining paper, with paper point templates, and some mock-up buildings made from cereal packets. We tried out a few ideas, and even has some input from Mum, before he settled on the design he wanted.

IMG_4349

The baseboard was made from foam-core board, which is easy to cut with a knife, even for an 11 year old. The parts are stuck together with a hot glue gun. The top is double thickness, laminated with PVA glue, and blocks of wood were set into the corners ready to screw side panels to later.

IMG_4348

More soon...

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