Mount Silence at Night

What I already wanted to have done back in December, I finally started working on... thanks to having to spend last year's remaining vacation days until end of March. See back in this post - the storage solution for the minis.


I wanted to glue in the floors, which are cut from 5mm beech. As there will be stairs, I first had to measure where I will place them, then make cutouts in the floor; same for the shaft at the bottom right.




After using a saw on all possible cuts, I used a rotary tool for the inner cuts.




Placing the models in different positions, I marked the final layout and drilled 5mm holes to insert 5mm magnets, so once hung up on a wall, no mini will fall out (steel bases rock).




Of course, there is no project with me messing up, so I inserted the magnets on the wrong side of the bottom floor... bummer. I cut out the back of the shaft, turned the strips around and glued three side by side instead of one - which of course leads to weakened structural integrity.




When the glue was dry, I holes in the back (smaller diameter than the nails), and sunk nails through the back wall into the floors, not trusting only the glue.




Next up is doing all the decorations on the piece, after the structural parts are now done.
 
I started decoration the basic structure by cutting 2mm strips of XPS foam, which was then flag stoned with a pencil and got a final structure with a tin foil ball.




I cut 3mm high and 3mm deep steps into a 4cm wide block, which I then cut in half to get my two 2cm wide stairs I would need.




Of course I did not entirely think through what I was doing, and did not take into account the height of the wooden floor...




Luckily, I had not thrown away the off-cuts from creating the stairs (never throw you off-cuts into the thrash too soon, kids), and just glued the last two off-cuts (6mm and 3mm depth) on top of the stairs to get two additional steps, covering the height of the wooden floor.




Time to glue in the parts, behind the stairs I just glued in a massiv block of foam. On the right side, I will cut the foam flush when everthing is dry.




Using one of the advent calendar doors as reference, I started to cut the upper door frames. The round part I cut freehand (which clearly shows). The circles I drew free-hand with a pencil, made an incision with a scalpel, and pressed the foam around the circle down with a pencil, so the circles remained raised above the rest.




After I glued the other stairs and floors in place, I found another detail I hadn't though completely through. I had alternated the steps to the front/back for more visual interest. When gluing in the door frames, I noticed I would not be able to place all the doors from the calendar, as with the stairs placed at the back, the openening in the floor would be right in front of a door... So less doors to manufacture.




When I started to clean up the desk I held the edge of the XPS sheet, which has an L-form to be able to slot sheets into each other. It looked about right... and it really fit at the bottom!




Never throw your off-cuts away too, early :)
 

Fimm McCool

Member
This is going to be so cool. :grin:
Funny how people read things differently. In my head when I was drawing them those dots on the doors were recessed, but I like them standing out more now I see them in 3D.
 
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