2012-08-01 Update- portals, walls and abutments

Where does the time go? I can't believe it's been a month already since last posting, but at least I have progress to share. Bridges- my main goal for the month was to figure out my bridge situation. I was only half pleased with what I had for abutments. This time, MR saved me! A recent article by Pelle Soeberg talked about casting your own tunnel portals. That looked like fun, so I gave it a shot, with some surplus styrene sheet I had around. Instead of plaster, though, I used some cement from Home Depot (the stuff in the small box). I also added some fiberglass drywall tape as a sort of rebar (yes, at some point I am going to cast some with that in it and break it, so it looks like mangled cement wall- military diorama). That seemed to work ok:

While I was at it, I cast some retaining walls too. Then I thought: let's try this for my bridge piers as well. So I took my existing piers, which were a little oversize, flipped them, and made them into my molds. In went the cement, and out came some bridge piers:

I also knocked out some rock castings and put those in place. I'm ready to start coloring, a la Rob Spangler's great blog entries on MRH Magazine.