Making Mine Scenery Part IV

The chasm taking shape.

Today we're going to focus a bit more on the chasm board section. Last week I posted the above picture showing the pieces I was going to use for the incline. I actually opted to split the small connector piece in half and shape the "chasm end" some.

The middle piece was split in two so they could be spread apart.

The other half is sitting all the way to the left of the picture, on top of the black cardstock. The other weird offcut was to be used as well.

Cardstock spread across the pink foam to create the incline.

I spread the 3 pieces of foam out to create a more gradual transition, and then I glued down a piece of black cardstock across the 3 pieces. This created a nice shallow smooth incline. I had some offcut foam suitable for making some larger rocks so I shaped and glued those down as well. Finally, I laid down the two pieces of I-beam/girder, traced them with a pencil in the spot I wanted them, and then I cut insets into the foam and card to allow them to drop into place.

Pop in beams, textured floor, and shaped foam offcut sides.

I pulled out the girders, painted a thinned down layer of glue, and applied a coat of play sand, just like the other board sections, taking care not to fill in my insets for my beams. After the sand dried overnight I then took a bunch of foam off cuts and built up the height of my mine side walls so that they'd be equal to the others I'd already made. Some of the shaping was done before I glued these pieces down, and some was done after so that I could better blend the new pieces in. With these pieces of foam drying into place I moved onto another project.

The "secret" tunnel!

This piece was built with a deliberate "secret passage". Of course, it's not much of a secret passage if you have a giant opening, so I intend to create a few different ways of sealing it off. I've envisioned piles of rock that can be moved with a Strength Check, which would require that I put a couple of removeable big stones to fit with that sort of theme. But I decided to do something else first, inspired by this pic:

This is a great abandoned mine photo I used as a reference.

I really like the sealed off tunnel look of these large metal sheets bolted into something - a girder or maybe drilled into the rock face itself? I don't know. Either way its a really cool look that I set out to emulate.

I've owned this piece of plasticard for 15 years. Its finally getting used!

First I took a piece of thick plastic card sheet that I had laying around, and I cut a piece slightly larger than the opening. With thick card don't try and cut through it in one pull. Score the plasticard multiple times until you cut through, otherwise you could break the blade or slip and cut yourself.

Plasticard panels.

Once I had my large piece, I cut it into 3rds. As you can see, they were roughly an inch wide each.

The edge of the blade was used to whittle the edges of the panels.

When you cut plasticard it tends to create a raised lip along the cutline. These metal plates are supposed to be beat up so I lightly whittled the edges of each piece all the way around to create a distressed look.

A Plastruct I-beam was added to the bottom for some stability.

Next I glued an I-beam across the front at the bottom of the panels. This is going to act as the base to help prop the panels up. I also glued a wide piece of cardstock (not shown) across the back of all the panels to turn them back into a solid piece again.

Here's where they start to look more like the reference photo.

Finally (for today), I added details. In the "real life" mine pic there was a sign affixed to one of the panels, and each panel had two large rusty bolt/rivet type things that appear to hold it in place. I used two different sizes of Plastruct tubing (round and rectangular) to recreate the rivets/bolts. Its been a long time since I've done rivet work, and I consider it a true discipline. The red handle you see above belongs to miniature "paper cutter" style device used to to cut plastic I-beams and tubing in a consistent way. Its called "The Chopper" and is available at serious hobby and art stores that cater to scratch builders. With the bolts and sign glued in place with plastic glue, I called it a day.

Thanks for reading terrain makers and would be 28mm miners!
-Nick

Check out Making Mine Scenery: Part I, Part II, Part III.