Becky,
Glad to help. The problem is the insert media button. I fixed the links by adding "" before each link and "" after each link.
Photobucket makes posting pictures easier. In the following picture, I explain how I do it.
Small World:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67831229@N02/7553332202/#
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67831229@N02/7553310288/in/photostream/#
http://www.flickr.com/photos/67831229@N02/7553304458/in/photostream/
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
ficker.photo.test 1
Wow! Nice work. :-)
..........Wayne..........
ficker.photo.test.2
What I am doing...
Got your image code from flicker: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7120/7553304458_66e41a86de_b.jpg
Entered in CTT using this code:
(This is the same code PhotoBucket uses.)
Giving this result...
Spectacular scene you built there. Great photography too. :-)
experiment three:
I shortened the image code to this:
and it still worked. Reminds me of the old days when we had to do this "[ img ]image[ /img ]" to post an image.
Well let's try this again with the new forum format...
Big Thunder Mountain improvements:
Yeah it works now!
Anyhoo, I added the building and tower and new landscaping up front. Also, believe it or not, the passengers seated in the coaster trains are made from hot glue! I made some molds of commercial figures using Sculpey, dusted them with baby powder and then poured hot glue into them. They're a bit tough to remove, but it worked fairly well. I was even able to add mouse ears!
Becky
Incredible!!!
Inspirational work, as always. (I love Sculpty). Did you ever solve the weight issue on the 'monorail'? Here's a newly found video of the park from 1956.
Doug Murphy 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...' Henry V.
Yep, the only problem now is holding her back! She runs like thunder with a modern motor under the hood!
I've been working on the monorail the last few days and the "caboose" is primed (Shopping for paint tomorrow) and close to fully assembled. I'll need something better than hot glue to attach the brass (or aluminum) side skirts, so most likely I'll epoxy the skirts on all 5 cars at the same time. But I've never worked with epoxy so...
Today I chemically stripped the "loco" shell and have been hard at work figuring out how to put together the most economical track system. "Most economical" would mean simple square pillars at track junctions only and let the rails hang free between pillars. More or less the same as most commercial elevated trestles, which should be OK since the train is very light. Or, I could cut 1/4" plywood sections to mount under the rails and link larger sections with track clips. It's the last major hurdle to overcome.
Looks great as always. How'd you come up the idea to make figures from hot glue? I never would've thought of hot glue for something like that. The most I've ever accomplished with hot glue is to burn my fingers.
What type of surface will the side skirts be attached to? Will there be any stress on them? Right now, I am thinking ordinary five minute epoxy would work. It's easy to work with, and is forgiving.
Well, I got the idea from all the glue drippings I've scraped off the glass top of my desk over the years. My original plan was to bake the molds and then try pressing raw Sculpey back into them. But I realized that it would be practically impossible to get the figures out of the molds and baking them in the molds might just fuse the two together. Obviously flexible molds would have been better, but I didn't have the supplies or the knowledge to make them. So that's where I made the leap to hot glue. From years of trying to get it off my desk I learned that the glue became fairly flexible after heating. So, if I couldn't make a flexible mold, why not try making flexible figures that I could peel out of the molds? I tried it, and it worked!
Some of them were molded from seated figures, bust most of them I only molded the torsos. I then drew pairs of shorts, skirts, legs, etc. directly onto the glass with the glue gun. Once they cooled I was able to scrape them off the glass with my X-Acto knife. Then I assembled the parts and started painting. Acrylics don't stick too great to hot glue but Testors enamels do. I also found it fairly easy to trim and modify the molded figures just enough to turn their overcoats and fedoras into shorts, polos and baseball caps.
A few of the riders (the ones with their arms in the air) were made without molds. I just doodled them on the glass and built up the body shapes by layering the glue. When a front side was done, I peeled it and added some glue to the back to keep them from looking "flatbacked". The right kind of tapered glob could give a woman long hair. A thin buildup on the front of the head could create a hat brim and a pair of circles atop the head gave the figure mouse ears! It is a Disney layout ya know! : D When I get more Sculpey I'll try some standing figrues. I can use all I can get and this turned out to be a fairly convincing and economical way to populate the park. And yes, it is easy to burn your fingers! ; )
The Monorail started out as 5 Marx M10000 steel cars. The front and back end "nose" pieces were made from aluminum sheet stock. 2 of the skirts are brass but the other 8 are 1cm high strips of the same aluminum stock I used on the "noses". All will have a maximum of 2mm of surface to attach to the car bodies just above where they bend in towards the wheels. The skirts clear the rail tops by about 1mm on a curve. I have Loctite 5 min epoxy.
This thread has me trying to come up with a reaction to being flabbergasted by awe. Through the years I have seen many a creative layout and this one wins the Oscar. One thing that occurred to me is this layout deserves to be preserved, not to be morbid..but have you considered leaving it to the National Children's Museum in Indianapolis? It's just too remarkable to be pulled apart and put into cardboard boxes..only to gather dust..
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Thanks Bruce!
Truthfully I don't really know how long they'll last. Most of the buildings are 65lb cardstock printed on an inkjet. Inkjet toner has almost as little resistance to sunlight as it does to water. Humidity also makes the cardstock wobbly. Unless or until I can use a better printing method the models will have a very brief life expectancy in normal daylight conditions. BUT... with all that in mind I've always tried to make it easy to replace the paper parts of each diorama while keeping the landscaping intact. So, who knows what they'll look like when it comes time to replace the buildings. I've always hoped that someday I'll be able to print directly to styrene or something other than paper.
Get busy inventors! : )
When I'm not stripping away rust from the monorail cars, I build models that require a lot of repition. Making trees falls into that category, as do my latest works.
I'll need a t least a dozen of these skyway gondolas and although they're not hard to build, they are tedious!
You might have some trouble making the epoxy stick to aluminum. I suggest you rough up the area that you want to glue using some coarse sandpaper.
I am going to show your creation to my daughter, who, at age 41, is still nuts about Disney World.
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