Its coming along!

Well, made good progress! First the set of 1:32 figures had to be cleaned from flash:

You see they have a lot of that:

After that they needed some basic paint, in my cads

Painting:

And drying:

Testfitting the wooden base in the box:

And the figures dried well. These will be painted:

The dioramabox will need som light. I choose a simple ledstrip from a shop called Action. They are well known in Europe for cheap products. This strip is 3 meters long, only white leds and has a batterybox. Very usefull on exhibitions where you don't need extra power for it:

I cut those to fitting pieces, need 5 of them. They have self-adhesive backs but I put some extra dots gel superglue with that to fix them:

For in place:

In between I painted the hill on the base a dark brown which I mixed from different acrylic colors:

Time for soldering the wires to the strips. Onlyconcern is to keep track of the polarity. Where you wire them doesn't care, all are in parallell:

First test, they work!:

Temporary fit with light:

With the front attached, looks good to me!:

So, lets mix some paint! I do that with simple cheap acrylic paint colors. For beige I need 4; red, yellow, white and green:

4 equal dots:

Mix them with a paletknife:

Dark brown, to dark:

Yellow and white to lighten it, more yellow for the beige:

Thats the one I need! This color is for the sand part in front:

And painting:

And ready, its the look I want:

Testfit after drying, with the 5 strips of light it is what I had in mind:

And with the figires in base paint. Can you envision my idea?:

More to come!

Greetz, Ronald.

Building a landscape!

My baseplate was way to flat. So I took some foam of 2mm thick and cut that to landscape for. The basic pieces:

Glued it with white glue and let it dry for 2 hours. Then a testfit:

Yep, looks good: Now its time for... Sculptamold! The one I use this time is a homemade recepy from a friend who does professional modelbuilding:

With some water it makes a perfect shell:

This was in the evening:

And pushed some spurs in it while still wet:

The morning after it dried a little:

Have to wait now for it to dry in whole, will take a day or so. Later!

Painting the background!

 Painted the outside and inside yesterday:

Then I made a sort of paintframe around the opening. Now it will be more smooth to look at:

After that dried I painted thes also gray:

Draw the outlines of the hills:

And started some painting:

Well, I'm pretty satisfied. Some hill, trees and artillery smoke:

And with the baseplate in it:

All it needs is toning down with some white. First it has to dry thoroughly! Now I will start some landscaping on the baseplate. See you later!

Progress on the small ACW diorama

As time flies by its summer here in Europe. Very hot so little model railroading progress. In September I will attend the Dutch OntraXS show in the railway museum. There I will help out my good friend Evan Daes who is professional modeler and is exhibiting his own new 0 scale layout Arbutus Corridor:

On that show I will do a demo figure painting so I guessed; prepare for the show early! The small dio I build earlier is perfect for these kind of demos so it has to be finished:

I did give it a basecoat and today the blue colour on the inside:

And the grey on the outside:

The inner edges are not that straight... will fix that in the end. Reminder, this was what we tried to archieve:

It will get a simple handpainted backgroud to create some depth. It also will get some light in it with cheap Led strip.

More to come!

Greetz, Ronald.

So silent....

Hi all,

I was shocked to read that it is 6 months ago after my last blogpost.... so little to no progress on this one. Still need to build me the end modules. Prices of wood went through the roof at this moment here. Compared to before Covid it is 30 to 40% more expensive, so buying wood is to plan first and buying it second 😉

For lighting I use Led on all my layouts. For this one I'm investigating Led strips that can be controlled with your cellphone. 

Next to all this ACW is still of great interest. And ideas are lurking in my head to incorporate 1 or 2 dioramas in this layout. You see, ideas enough 🙂

Keep you posted!! 

Grtz, Ronald. 

Some progress!

 Well, after all dried well I started to set the plan onto the modules. As you know you must take a little slice of a subject, you simply can't model all of it.

First I tried the height of the valance. My preference is around 15 to 17 centimeters:

After that I took some flexrail and played around with Bernie's plan in front of me:

My plan is to build the turnouts myself so I use the Fast Tracks printed templates:

Testing it with flex in between:

And gluing them down. I also drawn in the streets and slopes that will be made further on in this build:

Happy with the result! Now they desperately need some base paint! I also have to start construction on the end staging yard modules.

Greetz, Ronald.