You may recall that I've been planning to make a small Dr. Who scene on the model railway involving Daleks.
So now I've got a large Dalek Death Squad ready for my model trains. You may remember this old post about our first shot at 3D printing small Daleks. Well things have moved on a lot since then!
Franc's mastered his 3D printing skills and found a way to make finer steps in the printing process to make an new and improved set of Daleks for me. I've been straining my eyes and using a binocular head mounted magnifier to paint them. Yes, it all sounds a bit freakish but the results are awesome.
Here's the raw material from Franc:
I then mount the individual units on the handle of a small hammer using blu-tack to paint them.
And here they are with the Tardis on my old MacBook.
I've finally completed (most of) the roadway on which the tram now runs. I have had to very tightly fit my home-made cobblestone paper to the tracks. You may recall that I had built up the roadway around the tracks using cork strips. I've now covered those with carefully cut paper.
The main issue was cutting to fit the curves. There's no way this can be done easily by hand. What to do?
Well, modern technology (and Franc Carter) to the rescue. I asked Franc to laser cut some guides to cut out the road surface curves. He kindly cut them to my spec out of MDF and I've used them to cut out curved sections from the cobblestone paper.
I reckon it looks excellent. Better than commercial tramway stuff! It fits really well and I reckon eooks pretty good even up close.
I've added a few photos of the tram in front of some buildings just to show how the bprinted cobblestone paper looks with the tram on it and some buildings in the background.
I reckon it looks super!
The model railway is a complex layout in some ways and has a lof of tunnels running at many levels. It's also got the town sitting alongside the tram track. I've made a big effort to line all tunnels with heavy black card and I've done a light paintjob in areas inside the tunnels along the trackwork in a wash of black to get things looking more like a real railway. I have yet to ballast and will be doing light ballasting in more exposed areas "underground" and heavy ballasting everywhere else.
I've also fully levelled the area under the buldings in the town using the same thick black card.
All the tram track has been "filled" with plasticine to make it look more road like. I'll be using cobblestone paper to make the current cork look more road like at each side of the track. More on that later.
All of this has left me in a position to begin more serious landscaping. In order to dip my toe into the water in a small way I've started building the slope up to the left of the main station. In order to complete this area I've had to construct a triple track tunnel portal. I did this simply using brink paper (see here) covering a carefully cut out piece of polystyrene. I added details by covering balsa strips with brick paper and gluing it on. The tunnel arch was reinforced with individually cut out strips of card one bring high which I've arched over the mouth of the tunnel.
I'm readying myself to make a bunch of stuff for the landscaping and I realised that I need decent stone surfaces for roads etc.
Buying this stuff readily in Sydney is pretty hard and when you do find it, it's quite expensive. Why not use by Canon bubblejet and some matte photo paper and just print exactly what I want?
Google to the rescue...
I did a few searches on Google for Cobblestones and so forth on the Images section and found these:
I then used them as textures to fill rectangles in MS PowerPoint and produced this sort of result (PDF).
I have to apologise to everyone who has formerly read thsi blog - it's been about 12 months since I posted. Oh dear!
All I can say is that I got a bit distracted! We renovated the house and had to move out for part of that period, I also designed and built a prototype garden computer which worked, as it turned out but also died due to lack of attention during the renovation.
So now, I'm making up for lost time.
I've made leaps and bounds with the software for the system. It runs very well but the limit has to be 2 trains otherwise it dead-locks eventually with all trains waiting for the others to move. A veritable Mexican stand-off. Furthermore, Andrew Joyner proved that 2 trains was the theoretical limit using some nice maths. Thanks Andrew, if you're reading this. Do you want to post your article?
Still, I've vowed to stop working on the software and start landscaping. New blog entries will flow this afternoon.
