As the poll has ended, it’s time I showed I’ve made some progress on the Hirst Arts Cathedral: thus I give you the floor!
This is little more exciting than it sounds because it gives me a foundation to build the rest of the Cathedral on. There’s a couple of 28mm Games Workshop Mordheim figures on there for scale.
If you’re unfamiliar with Bruce Hirst’s Cathedral design, the floor is split into two parts to allow you to get inside the assembled Cathedral for detailing, painting and gaming. The split is cunningly placed, falling between the main room and one gallery of the final building. I may just build up the walls and towers for this smaller gallery first to see if the water based Selley’s Liquid Nails I picked up recently does a better job of holding the bricks together than builder’s PVA.
There are a few issues however. The first is that the join between the smaller and larger pieces isn’t quite exact and there’s a visible ~1mm seam between the floor tiles when the two parts are placed together. However hopefully that’ll be concealed once I’ve built up the walls.
The second issue is that I’ve glued the floor down on a single layer of 3mm MDF which is definitely not going to be rigid enough to support the finished Cathedral. I plan to ply 2-3 layers of 3mm MDF together with PVA and clamps to build up a set of shallow stepped levels up around the Cathedral. Hopefully that works since I’ve already glued down the floor!
Yes, I read all instructions and carefully plan all of my projects…
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You could mount it on a polystyrene riser and build steps up to it… so when the canal floods in the rainy season it doesnt flood the cathedral or, just to ake it more imposing.
you could even use architrave moldings for a decorative riser and brace it underneith with a bit of wood work
I like your architrave suggestion there Dustan, unfortunately my miter joining skills aren’t that good.
I was thinking of building a simple riser using three layers of 3mm MDF for a 9mm thick base. That should be sufficiently rigid to support the Cathedral I believe.
9mm of mdf is pretty sturdy and if the glue holds the blocks better than PVA which I am sure it will then is should be fine.
If you used Square dowel on the corners and architrave on the straights that would avoid the miter joint and with a little decorative use of plasticard you could make the corners look realy nice. This could let you tap little holes and inplant magnets into the corners for interchangable logos to represent various church factions (which is a looney Idea when generic religous symbols would work just as well)
Another option could be to build the riser with HA blocks and again hidden slats to support the stucture.
What did you use to cast the blocks? Regular plaster? Why are there some blocks with a different color?
Anyway, good luck on this! :)
Gerrie
blog.pendragonstudios.be
Gerrie, I cast all my Hirst Arts pieces in a US Gypsum product called ‘Ultracal 30′ which is a blend of plaster and Portland cement that works well to capture the details of Mr Hirst’s molds as well as have a high strength once dry.
I don’t really know why some blocks are a different colour, however the pieces that are being used to build the Cathedral were cast over a period of months using several different batches of Ultracal 30. So possibly it’s because the plaster used was slightly different. I’m also quite lazy and mix my plasters ‘by eye’ so it’s also possible some mixes are thicker than others.
At any rate it’s all going to get painted over at some stage!