Wednesday, December 30, 2015

A little bit of Theater - Part 3

As you no doubt read in part one and two, I ordered the Monarch Theater from Multiverse to build as a gift for my wife.

I left the build last at the point of completing major construction, about 3 hours into the project. During my third annual November hobby weekend, I managed to sink a great deal more into the project, totally completing construction, interior work, some detailing, and then spray painted the lot.

I also ran into my first two problems.

First was due to the lack of instructions (at the time of this writing now provided on the Multiverse site)

As you can see here, the sides of the marquee are built of fiber board and fiber card.  However, they do not reach from the top to the bottom of the piece.  Here, the top is just resting on the side pieces.  As it turns out, there are small curved pieces of fiber board that connect the card and board together to complete this section of the building, but I am not sure why they were not simple joins.

The second problem was revealed during the build of the platform and staircase.

It might be a little hard to see here, but the center leg of this railing piece is bent into place because it is about a millimeter off.  I thought laser cutting was supposed to avoid these things?  Anyway, it worked out in the end.

Stylistically, the stairs are not my favorite, as they are a bit steep, and have pretty high railings, as can be seen in the picture below (with the baneblade officer as a handy scale figure)

I spent a ton of time on the interiors of the building, including hinging a couple of the doors.  This reinforced my belief that I am not very good at scratch building, and that "measure twice, cut once" appears to be particularly pertinent when you are fatigue drunk, and really should have stopped cutting new material.  So let us skip over that until I am able to get back in there and clean it up.

I spray painted the exteriors with a cream spray, reasoning that it would make a good background color for an art deco building.  As I had read about online, the MDF seemed to absorb quite a bit of the spray, either that or the cream spray was not very covering. Also seen in the picture is a scratch/junk built air conditioner unit, which seemed necessary to dress up the roof a bit.

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