Daphetid Tunnels, Part Deux
With all of the track painted—now including the guardrails—I resumed the rockwork, turning my attention to the tunnels under Daphetid. It was good that I didn't start with these, because they actually required a bit more effort than the troublesome twins, due mostly to the fact that they're offset in depth from one another, and now I've acquired considerable skill in working with rubber rocks.
Consequently I decided to revise the tunnel portal arrangement. I was never overly thrilled by my stone/timber portal kludge, so I decided to partially dismantle it (above) and see if I could devise a better design. The key was finding a sliver of rubber rock to wedge in between the portals, where the small stone retaining wall originally stood. The candidate would be nearly dead flat, with low relief—just some subtle texture to suggest it's rock.
Once I found a piece that fit the bill (second from the right, bottom row above), I ground it down to about the thickness of heavy cardstock, then sliced it to exactly fit the space. After that, it was a matter of choosing the rest of the puzzle pieces and cutting/grinding them to fit perfectly. I must say that griding the rubber with a cutoff disc in a Dremel works surprisingly well; the precision with which I can shape the pieces is very high—down to less than a millimeter.
At the end of the process—which provided a fair bit of exercise, since I did the grinding at one end of the basement, far from the layout at the other, and there was considerable iterative grinding and fitting done—I wound up with a rather bizare-looking rubber thingy (above) that exactly fit around the tunnel portals. The fit was so snug that everything was securely bonded in place with only a few drops of CA. Once the rockwork was installed, I then crafted a new and much improved-looking timber portal to fit the revised shape of the space.
Now, I'm not about to claim this would have been impossible to accomplish by any other rock-making means, but I will assert that it would have been mighty difficult to achieve these results with anything other than rubber rocks. I'll also say that I'm much happier with the results having revised the portal design.