Office Shelf Layout Update

Lately I just haven't had as much time as I would've like to work on this project. I've been busy repainting the kitchen in our house, which turned into a bigger project than I had planned on. That's taken up the last two weekends and the weekend before that I was out of town so I just haven't had any decent stretch of free time for modeling until this past Saturday night. After putting some finishing touches on a few areas in the kitchen, I decided to put in some work on the layout. In my last post I left off with the main paved section cut and glued together. 

Since then I've made a few changes. I ended up cutting a new top layer to include a lead up to the track for the loading dock section to go between the two tracks. Doing this ensure there would be no visible seams in the paved area. By that I mean seams between pieces of poster board that I wouldn't be able to blend together very easily. I know because I tried with some spackle and it just didn't work at all. After cutting the new top I glued it to the other layers and painted it. This is how it looked before I glued it down to the layout.

A look at the larger paved area for the layout

Its hard to tell in this picture, but the whole piece became very warped as the acrylic paint dried. The ends were noticeably lifted up, which had me tempted to scrap the entire thing and start over with styrene. Instead of starting over, I decided to put some heavy weight (approx 50 lbs) and let it sit for a couple of days. That seemed to help a lot so I decided to keep things the way they were.

The next step was to secure the paved area and the track to the base cork layer. To do this I just used Elmer's glue and left the 50 lbs of weight resting on top of everything.

Found a good use for my 1000's of hockey cards to help glue the track and paved area

I'm going to let this sit probably until Friday night when I can get back to modelling. Until then, I need to get online and order a few more detail accessories  for the project. Things like chain link fence, the loading dock, and a switch stand. Progress is definitely slow, but its nice to always have something to work on when I am bored with my other hobbies.