Sarissa Trailer No. 1

04.13.2022

There was a sneak peek of this in mid-March, but after about a month and a half I've finally wrapped up (the first) Sarissa Trailer. There's also more in-progress pics for this build as I was trying to fix some mistakes made on buildings in the past.

My first mistake from the past: masking. Sticking tape to something is easy. So easy that most of the time I pull off the paint the tape is stuck to (not good). In addition, I manage to get paint to seep in underneath the edges of the tape so that the nice, crisp line you're usually shooting for when masking.... isn't. Luckily the internet and Facebook groups are full of helpful tips, the biggest of which is "seal between layers". So that's what happened. White primer as the base, then seal it. Now the masking tape won't pull up paint when you peel it off. Mask, and then seal it again so that the seal, well, "seals" the gap between the tape and the paint underneath. Spray the next layer and let it dry, and (no, don't seal yet) pull off the tape. THEN seal it one more time. I could have waited on this sealing step, as I added weathering powders next, which of course need sealing after so that the powders don't rub off. By the time I was done, the outside of the trailer had gotten 2 layers of paint, 1 layer of weathering, and 4 layers of sealant. But it looks like it worked!

It wasn't a past mistake, but I could tell based on my past abilities that trying to mask straight lines around a constructed, slightly irregular rectangle was not going to lead to straight stripes. As such, all the painting, masking, sealing, and weathering happened before anything was put together. I lined up and laid out the outer walls and swooped in with 1 long strip of masking tape to make for straight stripes. Much like the above, it worked! The only drawback for a critical eye is that the slots where sides/floor fit in have the original MDF color instead of color-matching the base or strip color. I think I can live with that, though. Or maybe it's something I can touch up later if it really starts to bother me.

Next up was a brand new mistake that led to trying something new. The roof has skylights with opaque, blue-ish tint which, for whatever reason, didn't fit in the holes in the roof. I glued them underneath the holes so they just looked recessed, but the glue seeped onto the plastic a little while driving, thus giving it that "this is glued on semi-clear plastic" that every model plane from my childhood had. Additionally, the blue bothered me. Luckily, bulky plastic and Elmers make for an easy to pop-out fix when you're not worried about what the interior ceiling is going to look like. Thanks to sifting through old spray paints to find the 50's-looking baby-blue that became the trailer stripe, I found something else I wanted to try for the skylight - black window tint spray paint, which is just semi-translucent spray paint. I wasn't going to spray the bulky blue plastic pieces, though. Instead I pulled out a sheet of transparency film/paper (you know, from those overhead projection presentations in the 2nd grade) and sprayed it with the tint spray. After it dried for a day, I applied a liberal coat of the much-used-for-this-project sealant, and promptly let it dry for another day as I was hoping all of this would prevent the paint from peeling/flaking off when time came to cut it. Much like the previous 2 things I had tried above, it worked! I cut oversized windows and applied glue where I was as sure as I could be that nothing would seep to be seen from above.

The rest of the work was the little things I like to add on. Google image searched, camping inspired posters printed to decorate the furniture-free interior. A smattering of different types of ground clutter because I wanted a stereotypical unkept trailer park yard. There's an "estate" sign added in where the sign is just printed cardstock, although I tried a test with printing on non-tinted transparency film and adding some white vellum underneath to try and give it some depth. The latter would have worked if it wasn't so dark in the end, so the former became the sign and thus Cisco Acres was born.

I have another one of these trailers to build - later, sometime. I'm going to let how this trailer turned out sit and percolate for a bit and decide what I can do better. There's also an Airstream-style trailer to add. Shiny silver MDF scares me a tad. But for now, I'll probably switch back to Zombicide Invader, and I've already got ALL of the remaining 50+ alien zombie-monsters primed.

Lordy, what have I gotten myself into?

Permalink sarissa precission