I discovered a problem with the laminated Bristol Board to Foam... the water-based fillers that I was using was getting into the joint and causing the spray glue to release a bit at the joints. They're slightly elevated. Normally, any urban street is not only not dead flat, but has all kinds of defects and patch repairs. So the little bit on non-linearity at the joints may not be a detriment once the paint goes on. For the bad ones, I ran a bit of thin CA into the joint and hit it with accelerator to stabilize it. Worst case: they'll be speed bumps.
I added the little corner coves on the roads that will create curved street corners. Street corners don't end in sharp 90º bends. Even so, mine are still way tighter than what appeared in the manual. There it listed street corner radii to be either 10 foot or 30 foot. I used the pavement base that came with Saulena's Tavern (Bar Mills) as a master for the curves, making a template out of card stock to cut little foam concave curves. I glued them onto the road substrate with Loctite Foam Insulation glue, and today started putting layers of filler on them to bring them up to the road surface.
There's probably an easier way to do this, but I wasn't aware of anyone publishing anything about how to actually make urban street corners. I cut the corresponding building foundation corners to the convex shape to make these curves.
While the filler was drying I set about doing some bench work for a change by making street signs. I know you can buy many of these, but I need a bunch and this process cost $0.00.
I used a few different things to make the poles, and since the signs are printed on Avery adhesive labels I just stuck them to thin styrene sheet and cut them out.
I used Plastruct "T" material left over from the bridge building project, plus some small styrene tubing. After gluing the signs to the poles I painted the poles with Tamiya Flat Aluminum and painted the backs and sign edges to match the front.
As you can see I also made street signs. Center St. and Main St. were the ones I downloaded from the sign site, but I have 3 streets to name and one goes to the train station, so it's "Station Street" (what else?). I went onto CorelDraw and drafted a sign in the same size and color as the others. Main Street will run fore and back, Center runs across the front and Station street goes... well...you know.
I'm going to need a lot of curb cuts for every driveway and alleyway that enters a main street. For the gas station (way back in this thread) I crafted both out of Sculpey and that was that. But this time, I'm making a single master and will make a rubber mold and cast them out of Hydrocast. I'm spending more time to get the shape and finish better than the gas station attempt. I had made a styrene mold and used it again to get the basic shape correct. It has to dovetail into the .400 euro-foam-core that I'm using for many of the building bases.
In one of my many German projects which working overseas for Henkel, we had professionally produced display boards. When the project was over I was able to keep all that foam-core and am still using. This was in 2001.
Next session I'll start the mold making process, finish up all concave corners and start painting all the streets prior to installation. As I write this, I'm thinking that I may start doing the plastering before street installation since it's going to be messy and the streets aren't.
I ordered and received warm-white LEDs to start using for interior and street lights. I also order O'scale 4 X 5 Kappler lumber for telephone pole cross-bars. Yes...I'm going to make my own telephone poles again because of $$$. I need at least 21 of them don't feel like spending $60+ on this one scenery item.
