Way too hot to paint today. I doubt I would get a couple of brush strokes onto a miniature before it had all dried. So I decided to attack another project.
This is one of the things Brad left with me before his departure. It is a pre-cut wood house that you punch out and assemble, made by CNC Workshop. The whole piece opens up, the roof comes off to reveal the first floor, which also comes off the reveal the ground floor.
As you can see, as well as the distinct segments there is also two ‘halves’. This is because it is essentially two smaller houses that you can push together, creating one larger building. Now, me being me, of course I have decided that I only want the one large building. So I am going to attach the two halves together to create one seamless piece.
First things first, I want the building to be quite open, so the centre walls have to go. The first levels walls came off fine, I guess Brad hadn’t got that far in the gluing yet. However, the ground floor walls proved to me far more bother. I couldn’t figure out if they had been glued in or not, but they certainly wouldn’t budge, whatever had been done to them.
So I went with the easiest solution. I broke out the ancient Dremel tool I possess, and cut the walls off. Now, if you are going to do this yourself, a couple of things you should know.
First, a Dremel tool like this was probably amazing thirty-five years ago, but in todays age it is a scary device of loud, whirling death. And on top of that, it is maximum effort for minimal result. I would have been better off using my smaller hacksaw than the Dremel, but I had committed to the tool and wanted to see it through.
Secondly, as well as saw the wood, it also scorched it. There are some fairly pronounced black scorch marks down the cut, where the blade has been burning the MDF. The billowing clouds of smoke should have given away that this was happening, but again, I just soldiered on.
After cutting the walls off I glued the sections together. This meant using PVA to glue each half together, as well as brush some glue into the joins of each piece.Obviously this is stage one. When dried the ground floor will be attached to a single piece of thin MDF so that the centre of the two halves isn’t the only place they contact. I will also have to add some further braces to the centre walls, to both create stability and to cover the large holes left from the tabs. Then I’ll add a floor, most likely made of plasticard, to the first level.
As for the roof, I didn’t have to take out the centre walls here, so there was more area to glue to. However, I still think I will add some kind of overall frame to support both halves. Though made of what and how I am not yet sure.
It was also at this point that I noticed the very ragged edges. Obviously Brad hadn’t cleaned up the pieces from where they popped out of their frames initially, and there were these odd little bumps over the whole thing. I just cleaned these off using a Stanley knife, carefully cutting away slivers of them parallel to the flat of the board.
Later this week is Australia Day, so hopefully I will get some time to come back to this in a few days.
