Started working on some of the smaller details on the locomotive and tender, adding buffers, armour plates for the buffers, boiler hatches, chimney, and driver cab windows.





As a mockup this works pretty well and allows me, using the Flattery plugin, to unfold the outer surfaces and create a mesh that I can print out - initially using a card template to check that the shells will fit the running gear and won't too look out of scale on the track, and then to cut out the main plasticard panels. Smaller details like inspection hatches and armour strips can be drawn in Photoshop and printed out later as they will be flat and simply cut out of thin plasticard and glued into place on the main surfaces. Here's the locomotive main shell flattened out:

...

[ Continued ]

SM- "Good evening sports fans welcome to a special extended edition of Slam of the Day with the final two matches from round 1, as always I am joined by my green skinned compatriot Alan Grotson"

AG- "Thanks Snot, it has been a manic couple of weeks with controversy, old habits and ,of course, slams and strikes"

SM- "Thats right and tonight we begin with the the Cleveland Bay Buccaneers against the Dovah Kings"

AG- "This match had the hype of a final as both teams had come off some extreme pre-season friendlies with the Dovah Kings showing why that even though they are women, don't think they are weak"

SM- "And the Buccaneers having one of the highest body kill count of any team in Dreadball history. The match started with the Kings.."

AG- "Why are they called the Dovah Kings if they are a currently an all female team?"

SM- "Don't know you can ask them when you interview them for their round 3 game"

AG- "Erm...."...

[ Continued ]

Howdy guys, building/painting has been fairly show this past month. Lot of real world stuff been taking up my time.

But I finially got my Super Heavy Fellblade tank finished. Well.... I still have to varnish it, but the weather is not co-operating at the moment. But other than that it is done.







The tracks I haven't painted quite the same as previous models, but that is because I ran out of some...

[ Continued ]

To make sure that the locomotive and tender won't look too big or too small alongside the existing OO scale trains that my son has on his railway a card mockup of the Sketchup model has been made. Using the Flattery plugin it was pretty easy to unfold the model faces to create a flat printable mesh that could then be folded and glued.



This is scaled at 1:87 (which is HO scale rather than OO, but means that the train will be in proportion to the track width), and next to a small 0-4-0 steam engine looks about the right size. This card mockup will also be used to find a chassis to fit the locomotive, and I've already got donor parts for the tender chassis from an old flat bed carriage which has 6 wheeled bogies at each end (the tender is sitting on one of these bogies in the photo below).

Not much progress today, decided to add some track to the model and duplicate the tender (the real train had two tenders, one behind the locomotive and one in front), and add a rough camo texture to the armour plates. Once the chassis frame and buffers are added it will look a lot better, hopefully I'll progress with that tomorrow, and if there's time also add some of the larger hatches and the driver windows and vision slits.