Firstly, I'm sorry for the quality of the photo, but I wanted to blog now rather than wait until I could photograph under natural light, so you'll just have to put up with the grain. What you can see here is a short piece of wall that is four feet six inches in scale height; the courses total four feet, and the rounded capping stones are six inches tall. The figure is the driver from the Brian Madge kit that arrived the other day to give you a better idea about the scale. The height was set by the fact that I'm aiming for a wall that school children could look over to catch a glimpse of a steam engine, so I'm not aiming for a large curtain wall of any form.
The construction is fairly simple. I cut two pieces of 2mm thick cardboard which I then wrapped in a printout of the ashlar texture sheet from scalescenes.com. These two pieces were then glued back-to-back to produce a foot thick wall. The rounded capping stones were produced by wrapping the quoins section of the same sheet (the coping stones weren't large enough) around a length of 4mm half round Plastruct (part number 90885). The capping stones were then simply glued to the top of the wall. Simple but I think effective.
I might experiment with different types of stone/brick paper but I think the combination of 2mm card and 4mm half round seems to work well, so that's one more piece of the puzzle sorted.
Printed stone can look a bit flat, some embossing would help bring out texture. I noticed a nice little tool on Phil Parker's blog which would be just the job: http://philsworkbench.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/double-ended-embossing-tool.html
ReplyDeleteI'd choose a print with smaller stones as well, those above look huge for a wall. The height looks to be about right, and you could always add railings on top as well for added security.
That tool does look really interesting and useful. I wonder how well it would work on the printed papers though or if it would be likely to cause tearing? I had originally intended to go the DAS clay route for the wall, but using the same papers as the factory seemed like a better idea, even if it was flat. If I could introduce some texture though then that would be a definite improvement.
DeleteYou're also right about the height of the stones. Given the height of the wall each course is over a foot in height which is definitely overkill for such a wall, although it would blend in nicely with the surrounding buildings using the same stone. Then again maybe the stones are two big in general.
Well at least I got the height of the wall and the plastruct topping sorted out.
Interesting reading those comments. My immediate reaction was that the stones were large but then I was trying to envisage the sandstone walls of my school which were huge (though less regular). The formal walls on the other hand did have huge regular stones which were about a foot high: perhaps more. Overall though I think those stones do seem overlarge. How do they compare with the stone walls in your area though?
ReplyDelete