I've had the stairs done and sitting around for a long time now; I guess it's time to finish the durn fool thing.
The project of the last couple days was making the lever which operates the gates. After Googling around, I found the following image showing the proportions of the lever.
I zoomed in on just the tower, and in GIMP, I pasted the cropped image below over the Clever PDF, sizing it to get it to match the size of the upper room.
From that, I was able to get my measurements. My first attempt was made from black cardstock, which looked all wrong. Then I took some stiff wire intended for earring and jewelry making, along with the foil cap from a wine bottle, and made this:
I assembled the whole thing with CA glue, and wrapped the top and bottom with a thin strip of the wine foil cap, and added a drop of black acrylic paint to the tips of the levers to resemble the rounded ends of the handles. I think that's about as close as I can get to the prototype, given the supplies I had on hand.
Putting clear windows in this beast at HO scale is very difficult indeed; I'm getting quite a bit of squeezeout from the CA glue, but I've decided it's pretty minor, given the scale, and it looks a bit like cobwebs. Cobwebs, yeah, sure, that's the ticket!
I'll probably make the roof removable if I decide I can't see the details through the windows.
