Thursday, October 1, 2015

Building Bridges Part 2


In last post, I started building a simple suspension bridge.  In this post, I  finish it.

The next thing I did was to make the posts. I used 1.5mm styrene rods and cut them with my new tool, the Chopper II.


I bought it at my look hobby shop chain, but I think you can also order it from Micromark. I'm not sure what great improvements it has over the Chopper I. A couple of issues. First,  it would be an improvement if the guides were a little thicker aND the locking screw was better. Second, and a bigger issue is that the measurements are in inches!


Come on! If you're trying to make  precise cut of tiny things, metric is the way to go. Not only that, but each hatch mark was a little thick, so there is a larger margin of error.  It managed to do the job and I got a whole mess of poles that I then glued onto the sides of the bridge:

I then built up the base. I first tried polymer clay,  but I couldn't pull it off the styrene base without distortion.  I then used a air drying clay, which worked well.


Once the clay was dry, I then glued the bridge on and covered it with some caulk.

Thought I had a picture of it with caulk. I guess not.
The last part before painting was putting the railings. I superglue thread. I am not too happy with how ends turned out.


Here it is all painted up:

Here's a GHQ Nyala RG-31 attempting to cross it: 

It's too narrow for my infantry stands to sit on, but it's supposed to be a narrow bridge.  I didn't think about it until now but I should have made a copy of the base and built a destroyed version!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks! It was a "proof of concept" or what us oldsters call a prototype. I wanted to see what would work and how the whole thing went together. I am currently building a bigger bridge modeled after the one in the movie, "The Wild Geese."

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