Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Scratch Built Sci Fi Walls

Here's the saga of my sci fi walls. I've been wanting to build some for my Pulp Alley meets Rogue Trader project. Cork tile is my material of choice far more forgiving than foamcore, more rugged too.
Here are walls mark one - a nice design, I especially like the angled buttresses.
And to make them versatile, I stuck the end buttresses on with rare earth magnets, so you can flick them off and have a long wall.
Two problems - one is that it's a serious pain to connect anything to the walls anywhere along the length of them with all those buttresses and other bits. (See the last photo for what I had in mind.)

Secondly, because almost all the cork runs in the same direction (vertical pieces along the length of the wall) I ended up with warping. Not major, but enough to be noticeable and annoying.
So, mark two. Corners instead of walls.
The lovely angled buttresses are gone, they didn't fit these dimensions as well. But the major design advance is the flat bottom that everything else glues onto. No warpage there. All good. But the more I look at them, the more I see a missed opportunity: they look fine, but they're one-sided. If I make them double-sided, how much more versatile will they be!

So, the final (hopefully!) design.
They can make corridors.
Rooms.
And the original reason I built them, using a few extra additions.
Now I just hope it doesn't take me as many tries to figure out what colour to paint them!

You can see the finished walls here.

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