Gold Mine Diorama
Luke Towan of Boulder Creek Railroad
www.bouldercreekrailroad.com
Making a mine shaft at first seemed pretty easy…. “Famous last words!” It’s actually quite a process and I’ve had to do a lot of brainstorming and experimenting to get everything to work.
My first problem was carving out the mine shaft itself, my initial thoughts were to simply use a sharp hobby knife and rasp to slowly hack away until I had the depth and shape I needed! This is what has held me back from actually starting the project when I first envisioned this diorama over 12 months ago. The people over at Hot Wire Foam Factory got in touch with me and asked me to have a look at their range of tools, I immediately fell in love with the Freehand Router tool and knew this mine video would be the perfect fit and there isn’t a more perfect tool for the job!
The foam I used is extruded polystyrene, it’s a fantastic material for model builders due to its versatility and strength, my model railroad layout that is currently being constructed is made using this foam.
The main set of tools I used to build this diorama as easily as shown throughout the video was due to the use of the Hot Wire Foam Factory tools, they were sent to me to try out and my absolute honest review of these tools is a resounding thumbs up! I will be using these tools for heaps of future projects.
The video is a complete in depth guide into building an underground gold mine in miniature! 1:87th scale to be precise. Building this diorama took quite a while but I enjoyed every minute of the build, all up I filmed 22 hours of footage over the course of 4 weeks and I managed to edit all of the raw footage into a 30 minute detailed tutorial.