Diorama: Ship Dock with Buildings

If you look at the very first post in this thread, there is a photo of the original drawing on the right monitor. That is Walter's drawing of the building he designed for printing on Shapeways. Walter is retired Navy, and lives in Ohio, so I would assume a New England feel to his designs, since we tend to model what we are familiar with.


If they used the sandy grainy plastic, it would cost almost $200 to print and if fine smooth plastic was used they want $700 for it. Anyways, I thought it was a very cool design, and when I found out he designed it but never printed one, I knew I had to do something about that situation. I'm only into it for about $30 of plywood, and several days of design and modeling bliss, so that's a lot better than buying a 1 piece plastic model and trying to paint it, with all those windows. Try painting and staying in the lines on that one!

 

Progress update, with the green building glued to the dock, it was time to draw up the walkway decks and stairs. Since there are tabs and slots on all sides of the walkways, and stairs in between the two structures, scaffolding had to be made to temporarily hold the walkway decks in alignment while they were glued to the green building, such that when the glue is set and scaffolding removed, the blue building will align up with those tabs and slots:


Also, with aligned walkways, the stair stringers, and stairs between the top walkway deck, and the rear intermediate platform deck can be mounted, and the lower deck safety railing at the end of the lower walkway between the two buildings can be mounted.



With the between building details completed I could then remove the scaffolding, feed the lighting wires through the dock, and glue the blue building to the dock deck:


And the last step for today was to remove the dock from the diorama base, and deal with the structure light wiring. I soldered the two structure lighting wires together, and ran them out the back of the truck loading dock, then painted everything black so no red wires would show up in water level photograph reflections, just in case.

 

Dr appointment today, so had little time, but got the front posts and handrails ironed out. Still need to do the front stairs and the backside staircase before the roof.

 

Stairs are usually the hard part, it's very fiddly bid'ness to get the stringers straight and aligned and to lay each step plank. So I had a good night's sleep, and first thing this morning I got a cup of coffee, and ate a bowl of Trix cereal for breakfast. Then things started going wrong. First I went to put the can of Bon-ami under the kitchen sink, and it bounced back out, flipped upside down, and dumped all the cleanser on the floor mat.

Next I got the vacuum cleaner out, and fires it up but no suction and a loud whir sound. So the dust canister was packed full, out to the garbage can I went to dump it, and it was packed so bad. I remember over the holidays my daughter in law had dumped the flour and cleaned it up, but sucked up some water too. So I scraped all the gluten out , and spent 30 minutes getting the vacuum canister clean out in the front yard, cause it's garbage day.

So I go back in, and try to vacuum up the cleanser, and still no suction, I bring out the tools. I opened the vacuum's beater brush compartment and found several twist tie wires wrapped around the beater bar, and a clump of bread dough had froze the beater bar in position, and the belt was squealing as it slipped. 30 more minutes to get that all cleaned out, still no suction. The hose had bread dough and hair dried in it. After 90 minutes, I got the whole mess cleaned up, had a second cup of coffee, and went out to the garage to tackle the stairs.

Guess what happened? I discovered why Trix is for Kids!


Well, that went faster than expected, and now I can start designing the backside stair cases.

 

I might consider reminding her that the standard household vacuum is not made to pick up moisture... And if it happens again, she gets to clean it out!

 

OK, I'm finished. I am not going to detail it with figures, crates, forklifts etc, because Walter, who this model is going to, has so many 3D printed items, that I want to see what he comes up with. So here is the finished model:

 

So, for shingles I used 220 grit sandpaper, placed face down in the laser, because sandpaper sparks and pops, especially the garnet type papers. The beam hits the garnets and beams shoot everywhere and the grit explodes. Anyways, when you cut it face down you are cutting the paper, and can use less power and more speed.

If you ever clean the gutters on your house after a rainstorm, you might find sand washed off the the roof, which is embedded into the composition shakes, so... sandpaper should look like a thinner scale composition shingle. As an added bonus of cutting sandpaper face down in strips to represent rows of roof shingles, the smoke generated stains some of the shingles for a more realistic appearance.