My wife left town five hours ago to visit with her mother for the next few days. So, I am on my own until sometime Friday evening with idle hands and an unusual spell of time I can call my own.
She laid out her plans last Tuesday, the first of September, so I will admit that I have had a bit of time to prepare to get this project underway. In fact, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night because I snuck out to get some assembly work done while my wife slept like a rational and sane person should at those hours.
My wife has put up with most of my hobbies over the years. She was patient with all of the sounds of plastic being scraped and sanded, the whine of my Dremel (which just celebrated it’s 30th anniversary as a member of the family), the thunder of half a dozen different airbrush compressors over the decades, and all of the various smells that come with the hobby.
While we were still in the dating phase of our relationship, she found a domed glass cloche on a clearance rack at a local craft store. It had already been reduced 75% off the original asking price, but she convinced the clerk to allow her to use a coupon for another 40% off the sale price. I don’t recall the exact amount she paid for it, but she got change back from a five…
In theory, this would make for a nice display, even if it is a little unusual and perhaps even old-fashioned in some ways. But, there are a few drawbacks to using the cloche for scale model work.
There’s really a LOT of vertical space to fill up here. I placed a few 1/35 scale figures on it after she bought the display and realized that this was going to have to wait for something that would potentially fill the volume of the cloche a little better. I tried a few 90 and 120mm scale figures, but finding something to fit both the dimensions of the base and the height of the glass dome brought no joy, so this sweet gift from my wife made it’s way into storage, where it lingered until just a few days ago when I rediscovered it in a box tucked in the back of the utility closet.
When I found it, I brought it out to show my wife. She was on the phone with her mother at the time and was actually firming up plans for this trip. I did the reasonable thing and hid the cloche from her, then retired to the bathroom where I ran some ideas through the research phase.
A friend of mine was kind enough to use his laser cutter to produce two discs of Baltic birch plywood for me to use as a plinth (or riser, whatever). Each is 4 3/4" in diameter and 1" in thickness.
He also included a “donut” shape that it of the same diameter, but only 3/8" of an inch thick. I may or may not use it to “frame” the scene because of questions about the grain of the plywood, whether rounding it over with a router would work well, etc. No decisions yet, because there’s a lot of work to be done still.
The two 1" thick discs were glued and clamped together nearly 12 hours ago under the cover of night. I unclamped it this morning at 8:00 once my wife had left, then ran to the hardware store for wood filler to eliminate all of the gaps, voids, and such. The plan is to get it smooth enough to take a veneer once finished, then condition and stain the wood before moving on to the diorama ground work.
The cloche’s base wasn’t too great to begin with, but it took a beating in storage. In sanding back the faux wood finish that was painted onto the surface, I discovered that the base is made of MDF fiber board and a few strips of vinyl veneer. I don’t really want to mess with it too much because it’s not a solid piece of turned wood, but it makes me feel better about cheapening out on materials for the plinth. Everything has been puttied and it’s nearly ready for sanding
It’s a pretty heavy coat, sure, but the package of Gorilla wood filler I purchased from Walmart this morning was partially dried in the container. Even after stirring and kneading, it really didn’t want to spread at all. But, part of this hobby is dealing with stuff like that…and I am far too cheap to make another trip back there for a replacement.
I’ve only got a couple of days until my wife returns home, so I had better quit screwing around on the Internet and get back to it.
Oh, what’s the project? Andrea Miniatures kit SG-S13, “The Barbarians are Coming!”
