Hobby Weekend

This weekend past, my wife and kids were out of town, so I had a bit of a hobby weekend (when not working on painting a bathroom, laying brick, or other household chores that seem to accumulate).

Previous years when faced with such weekends, I have built and painted a Tau platoon, and built an IG platoon twice the size of the Tau one (and which consequently I am still laboriously painting).

This year I worked mostly on a project which is still under wraps, and few other odds and ends.  I do not seem to have completed anything, and certainly not all the projects I wished to, so it seems a bit frustrating.

I did get a little bit of work done on an idea which has been percolating around in my brain for a while.

At work, we have a Keurig coffee machine (actually right outside my door) and the pods come in these boxes.

A couple times a week, I see these boxes in the trash, and it got me thinking about reusing them as terrain. As it turns out they are about 4.25 inches wide, and 6 deep, and about 7.75 tall.  To my mind's eye, these started to look like row houses for a futuristic city... however, at 4.25 inches wide, they are too big to fit two houses on the 8" squares I have planned for my city terrain.

Further, the boxes are made from fairly flimsy cardboard, and so not very suitable for a finished building.  I plan to use just the shape of this box, but replace all vertical surfaces with foam-core cut to be slightly narrower than the boxes.  So much for workplace recycling!

I used our Silhouette Cameo, a computer controlled cutter, to make some bitz and templates for the building, which was very interesting, and certainly more exact than anything I could cut with a knife. (as proven earlier that same day when I mangled some foamcore).

The picture above shows a couple of templates I made, window frames for two buildings, and a bunch of vents.  I stacked up the window frames and vents, and with super glue, effectively made them into stiffer hard pieces, suitable for construction.  The hex spray templates are for a set of rooftop solar cells, which I had made out of a magnetic hotel door key and some sort of toy packaging.

Anyway, that is what I did this weekend, what about you?