Update

The crack in my stomach (as my son calls it) from my surgery is healing, but I have not had much energy to do much. I started back to work last week, but it was basically, teach my classes and go home and crash. 

I am nearly finished improving on some old hills that I had made a long time ago (sorry, no pictures yet), and I thought I was pretty close to being ready for the first land battle of my campaign, but when I looked at my map, I discovered that I needed some paved roads, and some more dirt roads, and more river segments, and more forests.......ah-h-h-h!

Table top map for game

I THINK I can get it all done by this weekend, providing I have some spare time and I don't get all detail-ly, which I am prone to do. I also need to focus. I finished some trees for my friend Will, who is venturing into Warhammer Age of Sigmar, that I had started before all the medical issues erupted. As I finished them, a thought came into my head about making some houses for him. Nope, they will have to wait! I need to stay focused on getting things done for this game.

Building Bridges, Part 4

Here is the completed larger bridge that I previewed two posts ago. I would have finished sooner, but the heart attack turned out to be an acute gall bladder infection and it had to be removed, stat. The doctor wasn't sure what the cause of it was, but it was probably a combination of it being "sluggish" which propagated an infection. It was a messier operation than expected and they had to remove it old school. My 3-year-old says that I now have a big crack in my belly. I came home yesterday from the hospital and managed to have enough energy by the evening to finish it.

Two trucks loaded with rebels head off to the front

Overall, I'm happy with it. I could add more detail, but I'm more in the mood to move on to get closer to playing a game. I think it will look fine on a gaming table.

Big Scare

I had planned to post my completed second bridge, but this weekend took me on a different path that led me to the hospital. Early Sunday morning, 4 am to be exact, I thought I was having a heart attack. Thankfully, turned out not to be.

It was a huge wake up call. I've struggled with my weight for a big chunk of my life. My main issue is food, not so much healthy vs. unhealthy because I by-in-large eat fairly healthy, but the quantities that I eat. I exercise three times a week and can even get up at 5:00 in the morning to do that, but I have little control over eating. So, I need to do three things:

1. Cut down some on certain foods.  As I said above, I do eat pretty healthy food. Over the years, I seemed to have lost my sweet tooth so sweets are not an issue. My sugar levels are normal. Its the other numbers that are high. I do eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, but I love cheese and starches. I need to try to cut back on those somewhat. Cheese will be the hardest.

2. Portion control. This is the big one! I can't seem to stop shoveling it in. For me, I think, food is sort of a drug for me in that its comforting. Eating is also the few times where I have social interaction. I eat lunch with my colleagues at work, and Wednesday nights the church that I attend has a pot luck dinners. When I am in these situations, I feel like I am on auto-pilot. A more minor situation is that both my wife and I finish up whatever is on our kids' plates. Both my wife and I came from families where you didn't leave anything on your plate.

3. Stress, I eat when I am stressed, and I seem lately to be stressed a lot. I have almost no "me time" anymore. My two big personal activities have been my wargaming and my research. For the past several years, the research has been non-existent. The hobby activities have been limited for an hour or two at night when everyone's in bed, and that might be once or twice a week. Other than some church activities, I don't have any social activities. This will be, in some ways the toughest one.

Building Bridges, Part 3

Working on another bridge.  I hope to be done soon.

Building Bridges Part 2

In last post, I started building a simple suspension bridge.  In this post, I  finish it.

The next thing I did was to make the posts. I used 1.5mm styrene rods and cut them with my new tool, the Chopper II.

I bought it at my look hobby shop chain, but I think you can also order it from Micromark. I'm not sure what great improvements it has over the Chopper I. A couple of issues. First,  it would be an improvement if the guides were a little thicker aND the locking screw was better. Second, and a bigger issue is that the measurements are in inches!

Come on! If you're trying to make  precise cut of tiny things, metric is the way to go. Not only that, but each hatch mark was a little thick, so there is a larger margin of error.  It managed to do the job and I got a whole mess of poles that I then glued onto the sides of the bridge:

I then built up the base. I first tried polymer clay,  but I couldn't pull it off the styrene base without distortion.  I then used a air drying clay, which worked well.

Once the clay was dry, I then glued the bridge on and covered it with some caulk.

Thought I had a picture of it with caulk. I guess not.

The last part before painting was putting the railings. I superglue thread. I am not too happy with how ends turned out.

Here it is all painted up:

Here's a GHQ Nyala RG-31 attempting to cross it: 

It's too narrow for my infantry stands to sit on, but it's supposed to be a narrow bridge.  I didn't think about it until now but I should have made a copy of the base and built a destroyed version!

Building Bridges, Part 1

In a previous post,  I mulled over what kind of bridges I was going to make. It must be due to the lunar eclipse,  because  I seemed to have had the time in the evenings this weekend to work.  So I started on a bridge.

I decided to build a simple suspension bridge as a test run. After measuring the width of the river, I cut some styrene strips for planks and glued them to two long strips that run about the width of the river.

Top side of bridge.

Underneath the bridge.

I added a tab at either end of the bridge to hold it to the bank. I wasn't picky about the widths of the planks. This is supposed to be a crude bridge. 

Here is what it looks like resting on a section of river:

 

As you can see the planks extend onto the banks. I did this deliberately. In my previous post,  I felt that having a free standing bridge that I could put anywhere was the way to go, so I wanted some leaway to account for river width variation. Well, after about an hour of staring at it, I decided that there was no way for this to work as a free standing bridge. So, I started to build a narrow river section to go with it. 

I will pick this up in my next post.

The new Future is Pledge

This post is to share my hobby-geek joy with you all. I am close to running out the original Future Floor Finish. I've been using it since the late 90s, mixing it with black acrylic paint or India ink for a wash. I've tried a whole bunch of brands of pre-made washes, but none compare to using Future Floor Finish. What I like about it is that you can control the ratio of paint (or ink) to floor finish.

For reasons I don't understand, the S. C. Johnson company re-branded Future as Pledge Floor Care Finish. I cannot find this anywhere I live! Fortunately, Amazon.com sells it. It wasn't really all that expensive to order it online. This new bottle should last me quite awhile. I've heard all kinds of rumors that isn't as good as the original stuff...I guess I will find out. Word of warning: they make a similar product, but it has a detergent in it.

 This is stuff is pure liquid acrylic love!