State of the HQ

Well, I got a lot of work done on the HQ today.  And I've learned a lot about working with styrene.  The styrene lessons learned discussion will go in a future post, but I wanted to do a quick update on how things look with the model itself.

It took a while to get this far, but was surprisingly easy to build.

As you can see, I pretty much have all the white styrene parts together.  I'm planning on spray painting what I have here with Krylon Satin River Rock color paint, and then putting in the desk and counter tops, which will be made out of black styrene. 

If you haven't had a chance to go look at the plans over at Vexar Designs, what you are looking at are two rooms.  The first is an entrance which will have a desk facing a front door.  The next room will have four chairs and four computers and a tv monitor on the back wall. I may also throw some TV monitors in the common wall facing the computer center- it will depend on how things look at that point.  Right now, the design in 22 inches long by 8 inches wide.  I do plan on building additional spaces after this project is done.  Hallways will go immediately left and right of this section, and a mission briefing room/dojo is planned for one side, and a conference room and General's office is planned for the other side.

Welcome to the HQ.  Made by David
Construction, not in any way affiliated
with Halliburton.

So far, this has been a fantastic project.  It takes patience, but it has not been difficult.  The instructions at Vexar are fantastic.  I figure this section will be able to display 4-8 Joes easily and should look pretty cool when complete.  Like I said before, I do plan on doing a "how to work with styrene" post based on everything I picked up building the HQ thus far. I don't want to get into that topic too much here, but I will say that now that I've spent a few hours scoring, shaping, and adhering the stuff, its easy to use, and much easier to use than when I first started working with it.  When you prepare cuts correctly, it splits into very clean sections on very fine lines.  Pencil shows up well on it, so its easy to mark things down.  Its great for building models and for projects like this, and the stuff a far stronger than foam board.

On the other hand, it does look like the stuff is really bad to breath in, so I've been wearing a face mask that I got from the grocery store.  Its the kind of mask that you see people wearing in epidemic movies.  I'm using it to cut down on the possibility of breathing the dust in when I sand the styrene down. I have a ventilation fan going, and I have been washing my hands every time I get up to do something else after I am done working on my project.  And if the styrene dust is bad, I think the fumes from the "plastruct bondene", the cement used to bond it together, is probably horrible.  It sticks like death and you can taste it even through the mask.  I don't want to know what kind of crap it does to the human body.  It does say that "this product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer", on the back of the bottle, so that is lovely.  I also read that this stuff can be absorbed through your skin, so I've been really careful about not dumping this junk on me.  But it does get the styrene to stick together is seconds, and cures in 30 minutes, so hey, it could kill me, but it makes the model building go quickly.

Until next time.

David D.