Kira's Club Terrain - A Spring Clean Challenge

Whelp, it’s Tuesday night as I write this which should give an idea of how this last week went…

Though as always: there are lessons to be learnt so let us review.

So the bit that went well was the L.C.A Defence Line. Though I only managed to get started on this properly on Saturday (more on that later) I took a leaf from my recent kit work and setup an assembly line to chew through this process.
Above are some snapshots of this process as I worked through it:

1. First I plucked and cleaned ALL the pieces across the kits. This was the bit I did manage to make a start on in the week before so, rather than shift my focus from prepping the pieces to building, I just kept working through these.
2. Come Saturday I finished prepping the piece as above and made a start on the assembly itself.
   First I built what I have come to think of as the structural elements of the pieces: the floor piece, the initial walls and the buttresses that help them stand. I did the larger full pieces first…
3. …before following on with the smaller broken end pieces.
4. With the structural stuff in place I began on the decorative stuff. Lots of strips with the impressions of big old screws laser cut to cover the majority of the laser cut edges.
5. Next came these strips that sit above the firing slits in all the walls. They’re to be decorated later on but the relatively long and thin nature of these meant they would start curling up as they absorbed the PVA glue so this necessitated holding the, in places till everything dried in place: hence the plethora of clips.
6. And then came the Hazard Stripes that sit on the previous steps pieces above the firing slits. These are strips of paper cut from a patterned piece and stuck down with yet more PVA glue.
7. BONUS STEP: Once upon a time, one of my existing walls lost one of it’s buttresses, never to be seen again. I didn’t have the parts to completely replace this but the new kits provided enough extra parts to replace the buttress itself if not the decoration on top of it. After dry fitting this is place I decided it looked better than it being missing completely so down it was stuck.
8. And with that, everything was complete. 48 hours of gluing and drying and the new pieces where ready.

As intimated above, I didn’t get nearly as much time to work on this as I had hoped.

This was for a few reasons: it’s the Easter Holidays and so the smols are off from school, work has had me putting in some extra time at the moment and I’ve started physiotherapy work the ankle I broke back at the end of December. All stuff that has taken more time that I hadn’t been expecting.

So the lesson learned is maybe chill on starting big hobby plans in the school holidays. Oh, and don’t fall down the stairs and break your ankle. Good life lessons.

It wasn’t all bad news though: I did get some progress beyond the Defence Line. I got started on the Terrace House kits I wanted to do and got the undamaged version done and some of the damaged for good measure.

Sadly, the Rohirrim remained untouched once again.

Well it’s late, my ankle hurts from the gym and there is half a week left for the next pledge. I have some ideas around finishing up the bits and bobs that have been started and clearing the slate for a clean start next week.

I’ll be back sometime tomorrow once I have figured out what that looks like.