thebeerbaron

I don't know where that quote comes from - a friend used it as his senior quote in High School. Like the command "don't think about pink elephants", it's stuck in my mind somehow.

This is relevant because last night I went ahead and tried out my fancy new Kawasaki heat gun on this clay. And promptly set off my fire alarm. I tried again today, being very careful not to point the gun anywhere near the alarm (which is what I think happened last night). I even worked in the kitchen, which is a good 3' further away from the alarm than where I was working with the clay last night. You're supposed to have hot things in the kitchen, so I was hoping the alarm would not trip. Even so, I set the damn thing off again. Frustration!

I finally gave in and turned the toaster on super-low and put the clay in it*. I've been hesitant to do that because I'm not sure I want all the off-gassed chemicals from the clay getting stuck in there and then leaching into my food. But if I'm careful, don't burn any clay, and give the oven a good cleaning (with a nice long roast on 500F to burn off just about anything), I think I'll be OK with this.

But enough blather. You want to see my progress.

Tada!

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Doesn't look like much (and once again, I apologize profusely for the terrible picture), but there's some key progress in there. In the comments on my last blog entry, [URL="http://thefactoryfiveforum.com/member.php?2847-olpro"]olpro[/URL] woke me up to the fact that a 1/5 scale model was going to require a lot more clay than I had budgeted. After some serious late night thinking (and my bosses wonder why I've been zombie-ish recently), I decided to drop down to a 1/8 scale model.

One of the beauties of doing a 1/8 scale model is that all the measurements break down into 1/8ths and 1/16th, which my ruler actually uses, instead of the 1/10ths that I was using previously. Lot less guesswork there!

Anyhow, 1/8 scale is much smaller, I'll have to buy one or two more sticks of clay at most. It's long enough that I'll be able to get the long flowing lines that I want for the profile, but I'm a bit worried about the width. With 8" tires and a 58" track width (approximately), the full car would be 66" wide at the outside of the wheels**. At 1/8th scale, that's 8.25" wide. To do a half-width model would be 4.125" from the outside of the wheel to the centerline. That's not a lot of room to work with. Alas. I'm going to suck it up and go with it!

In the time it took to write this, my oven has warmed up a couple of batches of clay and they are now on the buck. As you can see, this model is a much more reasonable size. This is one stick's worth of clay and it's gone pretty far.

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The foam is creaking a lot as I mush the clay on. I may resort to filling the cavity with that aerosol expanding foam stuff if this keeps up. Hopefully soon I'll be removing more clay than adding it!

I meant to print out some circles for the wheels at work today. My printer at home is busted, so I'll just run off a bunch of copies of 3.125" diameter circles at work and use them to trace foam circles for the wheels. They'll get glued/pinned to a couple of small pen marks on those blue tape strips you see on the buck. I need them there to start defining the wheel arches which lead this design.

I took an unusual sick day (and a half!) this week, so I need to go crawl in bed and rest up a bit. But look for some big progress over the weekend! I have a feeling the clay tools might even come out to play...

*if I ask later, the correct setting is to point the thermostat at the bottom of the W in "Warm"
**and in writing that out, I realized I did the math wrong last night. I have problems with numbers (which is unfortunate for a computer scientist). I kid you not, on my scratch paper for making this buck I wrote "58 + 8 = 62". D'oh. That means my buck is off by 1/4". Easy to fix!