I Raided My Own Drug Lab!

 

Y'all may remember that recently I inadvertently built a mobile drug-lab.

Well, to atone for that transgression

I called in some reinforcements in the form of a Lego City Cop

and since I wasn't sure he was up to the job all on his own I called in a swat team as well,

complete with their own swat jeep.

The cop stuff was easy enough to assemble once I figured out, via Youtube since there were no instructions on how to assemble the many fierce-looking swat-team members included in the box, how to put the utility belt on these guys. (Being a Lego neophyte at first I thought it was some sort of shoulder pads or chest harness but just couldn't make it fit.)

Now the real work started!

I had to create a base for everything to sit on.

In this case, 1/2 inch foam board cut into two sections so the whole thing would fit into one of my 

hanging-file storage boxes when not actually on display in our display box.

I added a few extra scraps of foam on top of the table-flat bits and carved some contours and wheel-ruts into the whole thing to give the terrain some variety, then taped off where the drug-lab assembly would sit before starting the next phase.

Which begain by toning down the pink of the foam with a couple rattle-cans of earth-tones lightly applied so the solvent didn't melt the foam too much,

before moving on to dirt.

Now in the modeling world you can pay good money to buy various colors of pre-cleaned and sifted dirt from several different sources,

or you can grab a soft brush, a scrap of paper to brush onto, and any handy container, then go out in the yard and collect your own.

By moving around to different parts of the property I was able to come up with a variety of colors

I then sifted them into a brushed-on layer of thinned white-glue through a spare tea-ball, dropped additional, watery-thinned glue on the sifted dirt, and 'settled' it all with a misting of isopropyl alcohol, (breaks surface tension and lets the watery glue flow and seep into all the nooks and crannies.) working on a small area at a time and giving it plenty of time to cure before going back and messing with it.

I recorded quite a bit of the work on the base with my new thumb-camera clipped to a headband, but most of those recordings are unusable. I have to figure out how to get the camera to point down at what I'm working on and not out across the shop - - -

At this point I decided to add some additional texture in a few spots by collecting the shavings from rasping a bit of scrap foam and gluing them down using the same glue/alcohol processes.

This is clearly something I should have done before painting with earth-tones and not after, but it is a fantasy scene, I mean it's Legos for cryin' out loud!, so I'll live with the pink sparklies. But next time I'll get it right - maybe.

Because most deserts are not all dirt I added a few judicious patches of ground cover

and some bushes using the same glue/alcohol process.

To help blend the harsh black-plastic edge of the drug lab assembly into the rest of the scene I 'dirted' around the edge of it a little.

If I was using expensive commercial dirts I would have done this over a tray so the leftovers could be collected and returned to the bag, but since I can just step outside and sweep up some more I didn't bother.

Now I could set the major components

into the scene,

but before making that permanent, lights

had to be added,

and grime

dusted on.

I don't think I was entirely successful at capturing the wiper-marks on the windshield, but you get the idea.

The 'grime' is a variety of pan pastels painted on with foam brushes and fine-tuned by smudging with a fingertip.

Another marginal attempt at videoing what I was doing.

Finally the vehicles could be permanently fixed in place, wiring secured,

 and supporting characters dropped into the scene.

This included drilling a tiny hole in the bottom of the swat drone so I could insert a bit of wire

and 'fly' the drone over the scene.

The resulting raid was so fierce (notice the bullet holes in the RV's door) that even the headless torsos surrendered!

And in the mayhem of bullets, flash-bangs, and teargas, the swat robot got confused and ended up dropping its weapon and surrendering too.

There was one casualty, but the balistic vest took the hit and she just had the air knocked out of her. She's fine now.

Well, two casualties if you count the fire, friendly or hostile - that hasn't been determined yet - that took out the red roof-light on the swat jeep.

Clearly something went wrong with this particular light between testing and final assembly. The lights I used for that are very small and delicate so are easily damaged and not easily replaced so I'll just have to live with it

The only way I've been successful at stripping the insulation off the very fine wires of these lights is with a judicious application of direct flame. Just enough to melt the plastic but not enough to vaporize the very thin wire underneath.

And here's 

a couple videos

of the completed project.

Finally it was time to remove the Viking Fishing Village scene from the display case and tuck it away in a storage box,

so the drug-raid could be put on display.

Now I guess I better get to work turning the 

haunted house into a proper Halloween display.

And after that?

Well last night Fedex dropped a box off up at the gate.

The Wife needed a $3 bobble from Hobby Lobby ($1.50 with the perpetual 50% discount) and we ended up padding out the order to reach the free-shipping threashold. (To be honest we got caught up in the frenzy of catalog shopping exceeded that threshold by quite a bit!)

Now we have more than enough stuff to build a number of Christmas scenes!

Then this arrived today after months of waiting (many model railroad bits like this don't actually go into their limited-run production untill a pre-order threshold has been reached).

It's going to be an element in a Maritime Heritage Museum scene inspired be a screenshot from a  window-swap video.

And then there's  also - - -

Crap! Clearly the therapy isn't working!

Edit: After living with the new scene for a couple days I decided it needed more overall lighting. Something like a floodlight to give the scene a little more definition.

I've got a mess of these 12v lights. They're designed to be snapped apart and used individually but I left them as a string of five

and created a little mount for them out of a tongue-depressor, a few dabs of glue, a bit of paperclip, and some left over granite rattle-can paint.

With the strip of lights glued to the mount, plugged into a 12v power source already permanently mounted to the bottom of the display case, and the paperclip hanger hooked over the edge of the case, we have flood lights.

From the 'viewing side' of the case its not too obtrusive, but now I'm wondering if I should have just left the mount its natural wood color.

Before

and after.

I may have to use the current-limiter pot on the power supply to tone down the light a little. We'll see tonight.

I was sitting minding my own business while making that last edit to this post and a couple of Guinea Hens came wandering by, ignoring me like I don't count!

That was hurtful!

It's Not My Fault!

That's right!

It's not my fault - they made me do it!

You see, The Wife and I are very casual about events, personal remembrance style events.

Our own birthdays? For the shopping run prior to you might be asked what you want to eat on 'the day' in case we need to order something different than normal. Anniversary? Now that my aunt is no longer around to faithfully send us the card which acted as a reminder we usually don't even remember until something marginally related triggers that memory in one or the other of us weeks later.

And don't even get us started on the so-called Christian church's blatent attempt to usurp yet another ancient pagan celebration (Lupercalia in this case) by declaring Feb 14 as a feast day for St. Valentine (at least three Valentines have been stainted and it's not clear which one was being targeted in this case) Especially since this happened around 500AD, a full 300 years before 'the church' started acknowledging weddings as something worthy of being blessed and a millenia before the 'wedding sacrament', which somehow was suddenly supposed to make the milenias old custom of pair-partnerships more special, was standardized (and moved from the front steps to the alter) during the Council of Trent (1563 AD). Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, we have never been inclined to participate in this both commercially and religiously driven annual sacrificing of an estimated 2 billion dollars worth of plant sex organs!

Gifts? We don't  do that either, never have, because everyday should be special, not just a select few. (Awww!) - OK, OK, maybe it's part that and part because we're grown-ass adults and if we want something and can afford it there's no sense in screwing around waiting for a 'special day' that might not come untill after the metaphorical bus culls us from this existence.

BTW, we're not complete curmudeons. We send The Daughter's half-sister's two small kids something for Christmas every year even though we have rarely seen them in person and they have no idea who we are. In fact we're already working on this year's. (I suspect the act does more for us than the kids.)

My SIL's on the otherhand, are in that segment of polite society that believe traditional gift-giving borders on mandatory.

So when they saw this thing on the shelf, something that combines my inclination for both camping and puzzling, they just had to go in together and get it for my birthday.

Cool! But I was working on other things at the time so it got shelved

untill I had a project-opening in my schedule.

I figured I could combine this new RV

with my wooden VW Bus RV and make a quaint little camping scene out of them despite, or maybe because of, the scale and style differences.

So, once I had an opening in the schedule, I broke out the first batch of blocks and the 72 page instruction book

and

went

to work.

After a while I'm thinking 'Wow! These people must have every appliance in the Sears catalog. That's no way to camp!'. But I kept on following the instructions anyway.

Right about here I finally wised up, got freaked out, might have paniced a little, desperately ran up to make sure the gate was closed, ran back down to the barn, locked the doors behind me, and tured out the lights - because I suddenly realized that I'm not building an RV, I'm building a fucking drug lab!

To be fair, The Wife and I only watched one episode of Breaking Bad, way back well before I retired, back when my dad was still alive and Elmer was still hale-n-hardy. That was enought for us to decide it was way too violent for our tastes. We also don't find no-good-way-out scenarios entertaining or educational, just stressful. And between the two of us we've got enough anxiety without adding that crap to our evening routine!

I don't know if my SIL's realized what this actually is, or if this is what they really think of me, but now I'm accidently elbow deep into becoming a drug lord!

Once I got over the shock, and talked myself down off the they're-gona-come-and-get-me ledge I did the only sensible thing I could.

I carried on.

But at this point I deviated from the instructions, not an unusual occurrence for me. 

Before putting the roof on

I installed the wheel-sets out of order so I could figure out where to drill through the floor

in order to wire the model up with lights. (Come on! You didn't  really think I would skip this extracurricular step did you?)

After laying some colored lights on the floor of the RV, both inside and out,

I attached some white lights left over from previous lighting projects to the ceiling before finally installing the roof.

With that done it was time to move on to the base the RV sits on and landscaping around it.

This is where I got another gruesome shock.

This kit, for kids 14 and up, includes a couple of headless torsos!

Yep, propped up there in the sand just outside the door and right next to a casually lounging drug barron.

I suspect that this means something to those who stuck with the show, but for me it’s just creepy!

Anyway, a little more lighting and the kit is finished.

But you didn't really think I would stop there did you?!

In order to redeem my standing in the community - Oh wait, I never did have any standing in the community. OK - in order to make myself feel better, I now have to come up with

some cop-stuff so I can stage a raid on the lab.

Maybe some SWAT people since drug lords, headless people, and remote desert seems like a little much for one cop?

And, because I apparently can't help myself, I'll need to build a desert scene to showcase it all.

And maybe add a few - - -

Oh man!  - - I might need therapy.