Scratch Building a 1:600 scale HAS complex (Part3)

Now that I have my shelters how can I mount them?
Well find a board suitable for mounting a number of shelters - my choice was to recycle an old thick card calendar backing (420mm x 330mm) that has already been utilised by my 8 year son for a school project, waste not, want not.

The recycled board with initial layout

I cleaned the board up by demolishing the large cardboard church that had originally been erected plus I removed various grave stones (the small oblongs upper left and right). I then sketched out the approximate location of where I thought fairly random HAS would go plus the associated taxiway. I then suck down various black polystyrene terrain features (these were cut from Pizza bases) with "No more nails" glue, utilising bulldog clips to temporarily secure in place.





HAS layout revised





I then textured the polystyrene to represent grass areas and then, once dry, spray painted with white primer. Next I refined the HAS locations and introduced spaces either side to allow for door opening resulting in additional cut outs. At this stage I had settled on US / RAF 3rd generation HAS design, see RAF Upper Heyford for examples. You can see silhouettes of my Lego / glue tube prototype with circles for aircraft hard standings and areas to allow the doors to open This revised the layout from my original with several HAS rotating up to 30 degrees just to fit them in especially once the exhaust ports were fitted. 




Most topography painted up

  

I then embarked upon painting up the board with grey concrete hard standings and green 'natural' areas. The main taxi way is still unpainted at this stage

Taxi ways and hard standings


I had two choices for the how to proceed, either to paint markings or to use a graphic package and print them out. The downside of painting is probably my ability especially when it comes to circles. The advantages of using a computer is that of consistency, correctability and repeatability so it is this direction that I went.


I have used standard Microsoft drawing tools in the past for anything from house plans and furniture layout of my home through to creating shop frontages for my scratch built 1:600 buildings. So I turned to MS word and generated the markings for the hard standing area in front of the HAS.


Board with hard standings in place


I then took these markings and placed them on the board in conjunction with the HAS prototypes as another check that every thing fitted OK.



Board with final taxiways and hard standings



I then used this layout to correct with pen markings on the taxi way that was also created in word. This was then revised in word.



 

Both hard standing and taxiways were then printed in colour and permanently stuck down



Finally, revisions were made to the concrete and the natural areas using paint.



Painted HAS added to Board for final fitting check



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