There has been a further rather prolonged period of non-progress on the model, with social & domestic commitments as usual being to blame, including trips away. However, the third bent has now finally been installed, using much the same techniques as before. Since in this case there is no “ledge” for the footings, the base of the bent was secured in place by applying very small dabs of NoNails underneath the mud-cills, with any spaces around them then being filled with more small blobs of NoNails being dabbed into place on the end of a piece of scrap wood – then painted and worked-up with ground-cover etc.
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Jim Botten, on Flickr
Lessons learned as I’ve gone along: 1) make the groundwork around the base of the bent good before gluing the cross-braces and girts in place, and 2) there is a pattern to the way each vertical layer of cross-braces alternate their “back” and “front” components. The first photograph below is the (now rather paint-spotted) memory-jogger that I sketched-out to guide me in this process, which I realised only after more haphazardly completing the rear set of cross-bracing on my very first “authentic” tower. Thus the fronts of the two towers now complete are correct, and the incorrectness at the rear of one of them is (I hope) far from noticeable (see final close-up photo).
thumb_DSC02060_1024 by
Jim Botten, on Flickr
thumb_DSC02059_1024 by
Jim Botten, on Flickr
We are (of course) just about to go off for another weeks’ holiday, with subsequent “catch-up” time which will also be modelling-free, but at least thinking has already started around the fourth bent, which will be to the immediate right of the current group (being the longest of all those yet to make). Main self-debate here is about the form of the footing. Period and more recent photos of the prototype seem to show a simple earth-banking, while the clip from Breakheart Pass (falsely) implies a form of caisson using alternated logs rather than the solid walls of interlaced timbers common higher up. Somewhat also depends upon the (largely accidental) contours of my base landscape at any given point. So it’s good to have time to think.