hey

ive got a large 1/72 dio its way out of history with a lot of north afican,russian german,american,and bristh tanks,afvs and jeeps and instead of using resin etc for water i would like to try REEL water running through a river ive got a pump that mite work.


is this a good idea or not and any tips to make it flow etc i would be happy to here

cheers
matt

Bad idea....you cant trasport it and the water will ruin the dio.

It is an interesting idea. I have seen something like this done at a wargame show. Problems that come to mind are:
1) Are you going to move it?
2) Is real water really going to give you the look you are after?

Pumping and re-circulating the water is no problem, just remember to start at your highest point and end at your lowest.

I would give this some realy hard consideration before going full bore on it

Good Luck
Steve

I like the idea in general. I mean..how much more realistic can you get than the real thing.? However, as others have mentioned, think hard about this..how often will you move the dio, will you be transporting it..ex. like to shows etc. The water "standing" in the dio could lead to problems down the road..and how easy would it actually be to remove the water when you are not "using" it.

Mary (++)

I can't see why transporting would be a problem. You dump it out, and refill it when you get where you're going. However, it doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Nothing looks less like the real thing in scale than water. Look at all of the old fifties sea movies and you'll know exactly what I mean...

18Bravo's right. The real thing never looks like the real thing at scale (particularly water and sand)! :-) I've got an aquarium at home with a fountain thing in it, and I can tell you that water flows just too fast at 1/35. Problem will be exacerbated at 1/72. Besides, a river for instance in real life will be green with depth, at 1/72 it'll just be transparent. My suggestion is that if you want movement, look for some thick clear liquid the consistency of treacle, and experiment with that. Thicker liquids replicate waves and ripples much better at small scale.

Being a railroad modeler as well, I've given this some thought. If you want to replicate movement, yet still look realistic, why not make your waer in textured slabs of clear gelatin? Small enough so though you could embed old pagers underneath to make it quiver. Add strategically placed grain of wheat bulbs here and there with flashing cicuits, and you'll get a twinkling effect on the surface. Some Bonsai shops sell little fogger mahines you could place near a waterfall (not a big one, maybe just a scale 5 or 6 feet) and to cap it all off, a continuous loop recording of a rushing river. RR modelers have pioneered everything else in modeling (sound, lighting, use of pigments, chipping) so we might as well borrow from them here to.

A bad idea. Real water looks totally out of scale and out of color.

Beter stick to resin, paint or other goods that are on the market today.

To be honest I don't like moving (flames or water) elements in a otherwise static diorama.
To me it highlights the static elements as being, well static.. :-)

I agree with the others - real water will be way out of scale for 1/72

KF Magee Did it for a Client... It was a sewer Dio.... and th water did look way out of scale..... I can't find the post right now... but it's here somewhere

I would have to agree about the scale effects of water at 1/72.However you may want to experiment at 1/48 or 1/35 with the right application of water.Here in the States there are small table top fountains that probably could take a light weight dio display on it.Some are pretty small so transport shouldn't be an issue.Play around with one for awhile and see what you come up with.
cheers!

I'm with everyone else that it is probably a bad idea. It would look out of scale, be hard to move, and if the water stands for any amount of time you will have to worry about mold and all that junk in your river bed.

Cheers,
Salvo

Despite of all the technical and scale-related problems mentioned above, I got the simple question:

why?

Your tanks don't move, the figs don't move, there's no wind moving the plants, so why should the water be moving?

Another BAD vote from me-though the idea is good and it would be "different" than the general populations way of doing things the only thing that bothers me is as earlier described:

"To be honest I don't like moving (flames or water) elements in a otherwise static diorama.
To me it highlights the static elements as being, well static.. "

I absolutely agree with that... unless the fact that the river is still where it was before is the theme of the dio.

"And the River Still Flowed... "

Matt, don't take this the wrong way, but I think when people see all these vehicles together, unless you can convey a really stong "what if" feeling to it, they're going to think, "What the heck is this guy thinking? These tings just don't belong together." This would be made a tougher sell if hte vehicles are from different periods as well. Better to try for a more historically accurate story line in a diorama.

Look through the movie folder and see how often people get bent out of shape when a movie producer has to substitute one tank for another, even if the tank being portrayed is no longer available or there aren't any in running condition. Consider the Tigers in Saving Private Ryan and Kelly's Heroes . Excellently disguised T-34's but folks still complain they weren't REAL Tigers.

But if you're having fun, go for it, it's your plastic.

hey

well that post turned out different than i thought.i would be a hard thing to make anyway.

AJLAFLECHE- i start this dio when i was about 10 and stil havnt finshed it and back then all i wanted to do was make kits not the history side to it all but now i have changed to 1/35 1/72 is goin to be different.


cheers
for the repleys
matt



p.s i wasnt planning to take it to a show