Thom thank you very much for your kind words! I ll post some new photos hopefully soon after doing some work on scenery for a specific scene in South Pasadena / LA section most probably. Have a great day as well, and greetings from Greece! Yannis
Yannis, your layout is looking great, the pocket holes drilled in your bench work are really hard to beat, they hold the structure tight. Joe
Joe many thanks! Yes indeed they do help out with construction and rigidity. A key factor was the use of Kreg wood screws. I drilled the pocket holes with a different tool (similar to Kreg) but used Kreg screws and they made a difference (imho).
Update time on the LA, Pasadena & Cucamonga RR! I have been working for the last few weeks on a couple of modules depicting South Pasadena. Main focus of the work so far was the scene of the Fair Oaks avenue highway bridge. I have also finished the ground-work for the entire modules and then structures are to be added but that will come in a future update. Focusing on the bridge scene: It started from here, with a scratchbuilt bridge (originally as an RR bridge). The painted-on highway extension onto the backdrop has been long gone (airbrush removed it...). A few progress steps... oh and a new mountain-side appeared on the backdrop following photos of the prototype. Following through with some progress on foliage... (a commercial tree placed temporarily on the right side) And finally adding low level vegetation, and home-made trees. The eastbound local is passing under the bridge taking the siding and leaving the mainline for the westbound Super Chief. I hope you liked the update, thanks in advance for your time and feedback! Yannis
I must have missed this when you originally posted. I must say, I admire good solid benchwork. I se a lot of people laying track right on foam boards, I just don't trust that approach, I commend you for going old school and rock solid. Your bridge scene looks very nice. Looking forward to seeing more progress shots.
Traingeekboy and Vince many thanks for the kind words! I must say that i prefer to work with wood for benchwork even though it ends up being heavier. The layout will move eventually but it wont be portable so weight was not such an issue for me. I am in the process of building various trees for the module so that pretty soon it will look more and more like South Pasadena with some tree clusters. Hopefully an update will follow pretty soon! Thanks for stopping by once more! Yannis
Ok the trees i promised in my previous post. I managed to finish an elm tree and a couple of palm trees (Coconut and Washingtonian) Thanks for stopping by! Yannis
Bremner and Dale many thanks for the kind words!!!! Looking forward to making more palm trees since the layout is going to need many of those.
Many thanks Vince for the kind words. I took some ideas from a few very good tutorials i found on palm trees and changed some points with respect to materials. The leaves are made out of styrene sheet for example.
Thanks Vince, i ll try to look into it. As i said i got inspired by the excellent tutorial on palm trees by Luke Towan (check it out). I designed my own leaves and had them cut in styrene (instead of paper) this being a main difference.
I ran I ran across an article in MRH I believe a while back where one of the Cricut Machines was used to make palm leaves. The author used thin styrene for the material. I always wanted one of those after that. But we don’t normally see palm trees in Oklahoma!
The only palm trees we see around the Tulsa area is in restaurants or the casinos. We don't gamble but were at one casino for a friend's birthday party. They have a few palm trees dividing the smoking and non smoking area. Joe