The Beck Bridge - Tectonic Shift

A month or so ago I officially put the 'Beck Bridge' project on hold as I was not satisfied with the way the second version was developing. I was also struggling with getting a satisfactory water effect in the beck itself using a combination of PVA and Kleer floor polish. 

In reality despite being "on hold" the project has actually progressed through experimentation. After some thought I decided to return to the original cat food box version, which at the time looked like this:  

I gradually re-worked various areas, such as refining the alignment of the abutments and cladding them in 'concrete' - as with the mk2 version this is fab foam, sprayed with a Plasticote "Suede" aerosol and then misted with grey primer to get a satisfactory concrete effect. With ground cover in place under the bridge I then tackled the water. This time I covered the carefully painted base with a single layer of PVA, followed by a change in tactic, going to the time honoured method of multiple coats of oil-based gloss varnish. These were patiently applied one a day over the course of a week where not a lot of other modelling time was available. It looks a lot glossier in reality than the photo below shows.

Of course this doesn't resolve any of the original issues with the cat food box in terms of size and usability, so some further thinking was required. The obvious idea was to extend the scene and it soon became apparent that the best way to achieve this was to build a new, bigger, base and incorporate the existing scene into it. The depth of the box would need to be reduced and I was able to take advantage of the bottom fill being layers of corrugated card taped (rather than glued) together. Having measured carefully I cut through the outer box and separated it between two of the layers. To my amazement it didn't fall apart!

You've had a sneak preview of the new base unit in my last post, but we'll look at it in more detail next time.

Colin