A clean slate in Fordyce, well kind of...

I stopped working on the engine facility and decided to find another project, preferably one that was a little simpler and easy to wrap up and keep moving.  But then, as always, I decided to keep pushing myself. I decided to add a simple bridge, this shouldn't be too hard, right?

The bridge so far has been the easiest part.

I've been wracking my brain with this scene for the last week or so. There seems to be two ways to go about this.

Start carving things out from the top down or tear out the ceiling tile and foam all together and rebuild it from the bottom up.

Carving might be fairly easy and then fill things back in with sculptamold which probably wouldn't be all that bad, but the mess could be substantial since the ceiling tile will be dusty and the white foam could cover the basement with white pellets. Using a soldering iron or the purchase of a foam cutter could make this a little less messy?

So I have chewed on this pretty hard, almost like making the decision to buy a new car? I've actually almost lost a nights sleep over it and I figure I've about wore out a couple friends running ideas past them....maybe not?

I mentioned something to one of them one time that it sure would have been much easier if I just had the forethought of designing the bridge into the scene in the first place. I could have planned the placement from the beginning instead of going back and redoing things.

With that in mind the thought came to me "Why NOT tear everything (well almost everything) and start fresh?

So here are my thoughts, everything within the blue line boundaries will be removed down to the plywood base.

This afternoon I roughly cut out everything marked within the blue boundaries and removed it down to the plywood.

Once things were cleaned up, I took a piece of cardboard (not show as I forgot to get a picture of it) and cut it fit the area roughly.  The cardboard served two purposes, 1) as a template for the foam and 2) it will add to the height of the the first layer of pink foam which will bring it up to the bottom of a couple of the bents and they will be sitting in the water.

Next, I got the pink foam cut to fit the area in one piece and then glued both the cardboard and foam in place.

This layer of pink foam is going to be the lowest point of the scene and I will paint the creek directly on this layer.  The banks and surrounding land will be built up with more layers of foam and sculptamold in time.

As you can see the bridge taller than the roadbed, I will have to trim the bents to fit as I move forward.  I also plan to add another layer of foam under all but 2 or 3 of the bents on the right end as these will be sitting in the water.  

On a side note, while picking up the pink foam I also wanted some foam glue, but no one had any in stock.  It seems to have sold out everywhere.

I found one tube of PL300 foam board glue but it felt like the contents were pretty hard, so I opted for a tube of this.

It's safe for foam board and I've used this stuff before.  Several years ago I used it to skin one of my wooden buildings with styrene and it's still holding!  So it should hold the foam in place.