Weekly Waffle #145

It’s been a real mixed bag for me this week, I think I’ve finally manage to shake this cold that I’ve had for the last few weeks and have felt more human than I have in quite a while. Travel for this week has only been for a couple of nights and it was chance to work with guy I haven’t seen for a few years which was quite nice. To be honest it was really easy which was a nice change.

On the hobby front I’ve not picked up a paint brush this week but I have spent a lot of time working on the Grot Bots I need for my Crystal Brush project. As I mentioned last week there is a lot of work involved in building these things and I’ve come the conclusion that I have scratch build OCD. When I’m prepping these things I find that I have so many steps to go through that it takes an inordinate amount of time to make any sort of progress. Cutting, cleaning, gluing, trimming, cleaning, cutting and all for a tiny part that most people won’t even notice in the final model. But I will know it’s not just how I want it so it will bug me unless I do it this way.

Any way the upshot of all this is that this week I have a collection of white plastic parts that don’t look all that different from the ones I showed you last week. But they have had a couple of full days of my love and attention to get them to this stage.

        

One of the side effects of all of this work has been that I have decided to revisit my plans for Crystal Brush. Whilst I really like the idea of building a full Grot Bot production facility if I’m being honest with myself I just won’t have the time to do it. So I’m going to look to scale things down a bit, keeping all the key points but turning it into something that I think is a bit more manageable. So what I’m thinking of now, which may take a bit of imagination, is a grot version of a Formula 1 garage for Grot Bots.

Oh and on the topic of Formula 1, Congratulation to Darren for winning the Constructors championship for Mercedes. Well I may be exaggerating a little bit too imply it was all down to him but he played his part. He’s one of the guys that Lewis is always talking about back at the factory so hats off to him for all his hard work.

Anyway back to the Grot Bot project. What I’m thinking about is still a shed full of bits and bobs but instead of it being somewhere the Bots are built it is somewhere they are repaired. This will bring the footprint of the model down to something that I think will be more manageable whilst skill keeping all of the ideas that I think made the original concept so good. The revised plan will see two work areas where I can have one Bot in bits on a work bench being upgraded and put back together. In the next bay we will have a Bot that has been repaired and is hung from the roof on a hoist for a final inspection.

This will give me a chance to make a few tweaks to the original design that I’m hoping will add a bit more character to the Bots and fix a few of the niggles I had from the last build. It will mean making a few changes to the basic design but one of things that drove the original design was to try and built them so that I could make moulds of them and cast them at a later date. I’ve given up on that approach for this project so it frees me up try and add in a bit more detail than I had on the last versions. Mainly thinking about making use of some green stuff to add some cables and additional fittings.

The other big one for this weekend is that its Tom’s wedding today. Now that he has recovered from his stag do, although he has kept his Lady Hosen costume, the less said about that the better. For me from a hobby perspective that means I won’t get anything done this weekend and now that I really do feel like an old man it may be midweek before I’ve recovered enough to get anything done. With that I’ll bring this week’s waffle to a close, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend and I’ll catch you all again next week. I’d also like to wish Ashley & Tom a fantastic day and a long and happy life together.

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