It's a Sunday, you have a slight neck ache. M. Discomfort. It's Monday morning, your left forearm hurts on waking. By about 10am the pain extends throughout your arm palm to shoulder. By lunchtime you can no longer stand up for more than a minute at a time. And you can't really think of anything else but the pain.
And that's what a trapped nerve is like, which to be fair is the least worst of the options the NHS page offered so I'm thankful for that.
All of which is to say that while I had expected to be hobbying as normal this month, but the physio and neuropathic drugs have now got me back to pretty much normal.
Excuses out of the way, we now continue with our scheduled programme.
Junctions
I'm stalled for technical material reasons on the large "anomoly" piece right now, but my deal with myself is I have to do four boring pieces for every feature piece, so I decided to crack on with these two - as four-way junctions are something very lacking so far.
My intention is to try and capture more of the build process and stages but I didn't have that intention until I'd already got as far as the pic above. Oh well.
One of the major frustrations and time sinks in this project has been the cumulative effects of imperfections - and it's one of the reasons I can't recommend against emulating this yourself (I'm committed now, but if you want something like this there are good MDF versions available now). For example:
The 10mm square rods on the left is correctly placed, and the one on the right has slipped about 2mm out at the top somehow - which is just a few degrees of inaccuracy. Another:
A gap between the vertical join point and the tile edge of a bit less than 2mm. The consequences of an imprecise cut, or some bad eyeballed placement, or too much sanding on one or more of then dozen composite pieces that made up the length. It's infuriating, and every time it comes up it requires corrective surgery.
Where a dungeon or some such fantasy piece can cope - is perhaps even more authentic - with some not-quite-right angles, for an SF piece it just breaks the suspension of disbelief. It looks wrong basically, even for a space hulk.
/vent
I'm using one of my previously made door inserts to check for fit on this piece. These slide perfectly into the U-channels I edge the doorways with, but the few microns of paint and varnish definitely make it a snug fit when all's done so giving it as much space as I can now. But also strengthening the doorway to support some robust door fitting.
Octagons are so very space right? Which means we need a lot of little triangles of uniform shape. A lot a lot. Forty. Very boring job.
Ok, so then octagons and some bulk support struts out of 6x10mm rods, all cut to fit./p>
And so this is where I leave it today. Basic frame on J1 done, starting to add some life into it now - bits box raiding commences.
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