Television is rather a frightening business. But I get all the relaxation I want from my collection of model soldiers.
Peter Cushing

Thursday 3 September 2020

The Wire

 The Book nook project is finished! In the last post I covered the basic planning and construction and here I'll cover the painting and electronics. 



So this is where  we left the construction; apart from the shell, everything was scratch built. 


The roof was next - a thick card shell with Weetabix packet tiles. 






The final shape is done. 




I added a pub sign made from a balsa blank and coffee stirrer. 


The whole thing was zenithal primed with spray cans and then given a base coat with the airbrush. Black for brick, blue black for tiles and off-white/beige mix for the wattle and daub. 






Then just a load of drybrushing. The wood was stained with Vallejo brown wash. 



I added some moss effect and tufts





Then a wash on the pavement to darken it in contrast with the walls. 


It was around this point that I started to think about the extras. I installed the switch and raided the bits box for my bad guys. 



I added some weathering powders just to dirty things up a bit. 



The windows were made of greaseproof paper (always worth remembering that in many medieval towns and villages people couldn't afford glass and so would use thin animal skins). I added some leading. 



Now we ran into the problem. I installed the LEDs and wired them up. However, I'd got my maths wrong and couldn't run all the lights in series. This meant I had to recreate the circuit as parallel - which meant that the wires would no longer fit into the channels I'd routed into the outer case. 





Tester of the new lighting circuit.






Here you can see thre mess of the wiring loom outside. Also, have green in the alleyway meant you couldn't see the depth so I changed the circuit again to swap a red light for the green. 











Now just the final touches; the skeltons were glued in




Then the Watch



Leaving us with the final look:


I then taped up the wires and sprayed the outside:









And here it is installed in one of the upstairs bookcases. 






I am overall, very happy with how this turned out. It's nice to have a way to display models. I suspect I will be making more of these! I hope the blog has been useful and I do recommend making one of these. 


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