Oh no, this time it is not a finished part of my dio, but I wanted to show you what I’m doing right now and where the project is headed.
I started working on the castle a few weeks ago.
Here is what I want to do. I will do the front half of it , so , as you can see on the first photo, I will do the tower with the highest roof and do all the front to the right side.
The most of the backside is not very interesting from architecture point of view and with my setup you will be able to see in the inner court-yard.



The whole project will be made in individual modules. This is the module for the castle with only the cover missing and has 1,50 m to 0,70 (what is 5x2 feet I think)

The position of the shadowbox you can see is situated exactly between the two towers.
I made the module with 15 mm Multilayer Birchwood. Right now it is already pretty heavy and I will have certain transport problems with it later on.

As I want to show, through a hole situated between the towers and above the prisoners cellar, the action inside two rooms of the castle (the only way to show some american soldiers as they were nearly all in the castle), one big problem will be the order of building and painting and positioning figures.
On this picture you can see on the left side the big tower with a finished interior of the last level. The highest tower is on the right side with Styro glued to a wooden structure for the round part of it. Sorry , but my lack of english vocabulary is hitting me here.

from the other side it looks like this. Two levels wil be visible.


I know that this is not easy to see what I’m doing with this early pics, but it is also for me a big puzzle and I hope I will be able to put it correctly together.

Cheers

Claude

Impressive! How long do you anticipate this will take you to build? I think your basic structure is looking good so far. I am curious as to what you will use to close the gaps? Be sure to choose something that will have some give to it, so when you do have to move the structure you don't create cracks! Did you ever get your half-track question answered?

Good morning Paul,

Actually i am progressing very well, but you only need to look at the to roofs of the towers, and as i will show them not destructed (they look to good for destruction), they alone will take me certainly 3-4 months to work on. An optimistic timeline is a good year. In and around the castle i will do about 20-30 figs, who need to be placed before i close the roof.

As this is a corner module of the whole thing, the rear is already closed. On the left side (down from the shadowbox level), i will try to do with modelling wire netting (sp?) covered with a bit of plaster. On this side i only need to show some more rocks. That will be the other finished side.
The intermediate level will be support for the two towers and part of a wall so some gaps will close. Other gaps will be closed simply when i put the modules side by side.
That is really a difficult part as i need to consider the height difference of everything and i am really anxious to see how this will work out.
If i slide the box a bit from the table i will have limited access to both shadowboxes by crawling under it.
In the end, the shadowbox wil only be some 70 cm from the ground, if i want the people to see the germans attacking on the other side of the town, because this will be at 150 cm from the gound in this case.

Cheers



PS: About the halftrack-radio:
Pierre, he certainly will read this, proposed me an alternative with an SCR299, even with a Picture of one of them in a halftrack, and he has some of the needed parts, without scratchbuiding. Perhaps, Pierre, you can update the SCR193-thread with this picture, if anyone else is interested.

Good deal I would like to see this half-track!

Claude:

Just an incredible piece of work. I applaud your
drive to create such a time consuming, yet
unique approach to a shadow box styled
model. And I have no problem with your English, and can understand all your text quite well. Your description
of how you've conceptualized the construction of this
most interesting 'presentation' is as interesting as
the pictures. Thanks for taking time to show us the
begining stages of this very large model. Hopefully,
you'll come back from time to time, as Cheyanne and
other major builders at Big A do, with more
updated photos and text. Very exciting!