Peb. 24th: Continuing the perimeter!

Today we worked on tying the east section together with the 4X3 industrial section on the northeast side.  We have to put in a gorge with a trestle but we didn't get to that this weekend.  We put in 9 hours of work on the layout between yesterday and today and my father put in more than that on his own building houses out of balsa wood and printed patterns on thick stock paper.  We had trouble with one area by a canyon cutout on the east side...the bottom was uneven and the glue didn't overcome the foam's natural tendency to warp.  It doesn't affect our tracks any.  Today I cut a lot of ramps.  It's my least favorite thing to do with the hot wire scroll table because it requires far more precision than my shaky hands can provide and thinking about it while doing it makes it that much worse.  We are getting really good at cutting out smaller pieces and fitting everything together just so but the next phase of the build is going to be the most challenging so far...several tracks crossing over each other at different heights.  This is going to look amazing when it's done, though!!!!  It's already far more complex than I could have hoped for and that's a good thing!!!

Check out this annotated video of our progress to this point:

Feb 17th: Laying foam!

We spent several hours today dabbling in the basement.  We are definitely getting better at doing the foam.  We did the edging of the terrain on the east side of the setup and glued the foam down there.  Then we moved on to the 4X3 area, laying foam and cutting ramps and eventually gluing all that down, too.  We used soup and tomato cans as weight to hold the foam as the glue dried.  We used 2:3's to hold down the ramp areas.  We also made an elevation adjustment to the mountain table.

The tracks are laid and so are our plans...

Last weekend we started laying down foam for the terrain.  It's been an interesting exercise in engineering and materials science.  We have actually gotten farther along than this but I want to wait until this weekend is over before posting the next video.  It's pretty startling what you can accomplish with a hot wire scroll table!  Next challenge...the mountain.  It's going to be interesting!