Motivation, inspiration and other ation-esque terms sometime fades away as a project progresses for a host of reasons. This project was chugging along last year and just stopped cold. It sat on my workbench and just occupied the space for a good while before I came to the realization that I did not want to work on it. I boxed it up and shelved this for a little over a year. I recently revisited a 7 year shelved kit that has since been shelved to get some quicker little projects completed. This happens. Interests wanes and sometimes, it is best to just put something away in hopes that someday, the interest returns and the project gets completed.
The first set of pictures was where I last left off. I had started getting the main base piece together. I had cut a hole out, glued some mesh in place. The idea here is to use a picture of some GMs I had previsouly built, and place the picture under the base to create an illusion that there is an underground element to the base. The wood base is built up with some balsa wood sides. This was about where I stopped last year; I had some work on various pieces and there was no mental execution plan for the project.
About a month ago, I brought the project out of storage and laid it out on my workbench. And there it sat again. I think the issue here is that I didn’t really have a plan. Projects of this size can easily get out of hand because there are just so many pieces and just focusing on a starting point was difficult. So there it sat, again. This week, however, renewed energy suddenly returned and a plan for finishing was actually written out. I needed to start with finishing smaller pieces one by one; so I focused on the shipping container element.
I printed out some new containers as I wasn’t really happy with the resin copies I made last year. I made 40 ft and 20 ft containers.
Once printed, I needed to put the containers into a acetone vapor bath to help dissolve the byproduct 3D printing resolution lines.
Returning to the base. During this week’s live broadcast; I did some small detail work on the base. A railing is added as well as some dock anchors made from styrene.
Once the containers dry from the vapor bath process; they were primed. I also primed the “refinery” element for the base as well.
The sides of the containers were missing some details, so I glued in some strips of styrene, and once painted, the containers start to look better.
I picked out a few colors and sprayed the containers and got them gloss coated. More planning with the base help visualize things as well as gives me a photographical plan for the container placement. There’s still plenty of work on the containers, but it’s coming along and there’s a sense of accomplishment which helps keep the motivation going.
Keeping in with the focus on specific elements of the base, the GMs were sanded and base coated.
I still have to finish sanding the Zeonic suits; but it looks like things are moving along. I may actually finally finish this damn thing.
