Dad's Army 5 - Diorama 2

I've been working on the diorama layout all week, with very little to show for it; there's not even been enough progress to generate any worthwhile photos.

So little progress, in fact, that I'm giving serious thought about reverting to Plan A, which was to just have the figures on the church hall floor. It may not look as good, but it will be done in time. Given some of the problems I'm encountering, I'm unlikely to have completed even the left wall of the full project any time soon.

This week was largely concerned with the office door in the left wall. I have cut out the door surrounds, and have both 2mm and 2.5mm deep versions. The wall is 1.5mm deep, so 2mm is probably the correct size. However, 2mm doesn't really protrude enough and I'm worried it will disappear when I paint the model. The surround edges were mitred by sanding the pieces on sandpaper, and they have actually turned out quite well.

I have cut out the space for the door. This was done by scraper and scalpel, as I couldn't get the scribe and snap approach to work. Unfortunately, the edges aren't quite as clean and square as I'd like, so there's a bit/lot more sanding to do.

I drew up a pattern for the panels of the door in InkScape and printed it out. Unfortunately, the sizes were all wrong, so I redid them by hand on paper, and then transferred the measurements to plasticard. I'm using 0.5mm for the plain back of the door and another 0.5mm piece for the panel section, although I'm not sure how easy cutting very small rectangles from 0.5mm plasticard will be.

I taped "The Godiva Affair" episode last weekend, and it has provided a wealth of new screen captures, including some areas I didn't have, such as the main door to the hall. However, the downside to this is that there now seems more work to do than ever. One small example is that I noticed the insets on the office door are arched at the top, not straight as I had thought. This isn't a big change, but will make cutting out the insets that bit more complicated.

A bigger thing that I noticed was that the bottom section of the walls the whole way around is actually wooden panels. This means I'll have to scribe each one, probably 2mm apart. Having only just recovered from scribing the floor, I'm not looking forward to this.

As a break from modelling, I managed to get my skeletons nearly finished, and have cleaned and undercoated my next group, Pig Iron Heavy Infantry Command Squad,  Wardroids, and a couple of Citadel Imperial Guard Walkers.

I'll decide at some point next week on whether I'm parking the diorama and just building the floor, but the smart money says that's the most sensible approach.