@CraigHallums, happy to provide inspiration!
@ste271276, the transport trays are only stackable. Here's a close-up of one (other nine are identical):
The base is a 33x49 cm piece of plywood (5mm thick in my case, but this can, of course, vary). The end pieces are cut from 95x15mm lumber, and the long & narrow supports are 46 cm long cuts of 15x15mm wood (four pieces needed). The lower ones are just glued in place; the upper ones are also screwed on the end pieces. Here's a look underneath:
You can see that the end pieces are also screwed onto the base board. The final pieces, two 27cm long cuts of 15x15 mm wood are only glued on. These allow stacking of the trays so that one above another fits snugly in place and does not slide off. So, in sum, this is what you'd need:
- a piece of plywood cut to 33 x 49 cm
- two pieces of 15x95 mm lumber, 33 cm long
- four pieces of 15x15 mm lumber, 46 cm long
- two pieces of 15x15 mm lumber, 27 cm long
- wood glue & eight screws
Using these measurements yields a tray that fits 4x5 War of the Ring infantry movement trays or 5x5 cavalry movement trays. If you use lumber of different thickness, change the size of the baseboard accordingly so that the actual storage area is about 30 x 46 cm.
Then, today's progress - I procured lumber for the Amon Hen support structure (no photo, sorry - just a dozen bits of 45x21mm lumber at different lengths). In addition, I sanded smooth the layer of filler in the Anduin shore piece, painted the shoreline with a neutral grey basecoat, and the river with different shades of blue. After the basecoats had dried, I spread some glue on the shoreline and added Woodland Scenics earth blend fine turf, WS yellow grass fine turf, and grey ballast from Asoa and Tillig (German model railroad scenery manufacturers).
The scatter material was sprayed with wet water (water + a few drops of detergent), and I then used an eyedropper to soak the shore with Woodland Scenics scenic cement. Boat tracks were pressed on a suitable spot:
An insider tip: I have a large collection of one litre latex paint cans with an equally large range of colors specifically mixed by a local hardware store. I start with a screen capture from the movies, open it in Photoshop and use the eyedropper tool (3x3 or 5x5 pixel average) to determine the hex code of the color I need for a terrain piece. Say, I need paint for the river Anduin water at Nen Hithoel. I take a screen cap, open it in Photoshop and determine the hex code of the color I'd need. Then I go to this web site:
http://www.perbang.dk/rgb/B3ADA7/...and look for the closest match in NCS color system (in the case of B3ADA7, NCS S 2502-R is a 97% match to the brownish grey shade of the Argonath statues). There are also plenty of other color systems available; I use NCS because the local hardware store can mix any NCS code color for me.
Finally, I've continued casting parts - plenty of Helm's Deep columns, and I should have now enough parts to finish building the Seeing Seat. I still need a couple of flawless eagle halves for Oldman Willow, though. That's a job for tomorrow!