One flight of madness

This is my first 1/48th moment and conclusions are drawn.  You have to be very nimble-fingered, patient and willing to persevere.  I am sure after doing this stuff for some time everything gets much easier, but for the first ever job in this scale these stairs tested my fingers, patience and perseverance to their limit.

Step one was to stain the pieces on both sides.  I have a great glue which will stick stained pieces and I can't imagine trying to stain the finished piece when it is as tricky a shape as this one.

Problem one was I found it quite hard to determine which were the bits I needed and what was scrap.  I can only recommend you do as I did and refer endlessly to any diagram you have with the kit and carefully identify each shape, one at a time.  Then, equally carefully, locate any tabs attaching the piece to the waste.  Check, check and check before picking up the knife.  

I am happy to say I got it right and ended up with all the pieces and nothing broken.

The tabs you see on these components are the tabs needed for construction - these increased the identification doubts a little more.

Again, learn from me, the next thing you should do is go over all these pieces again with your stain pen and touch in all the pale edges which didn't received stain while they were still in the 'frame'.  I didn't do this and spent ages fiddling around with the finished staircase, touching up bits and bobs here and there.

I decided not to put glue on the joints before assembly because they took so much time to get right and I was nervy about the glue setting up on something that wasn't at quite the right angle.

I assembled the lower stairs and then pushed glue into the joins.  It seems to have worked just fine.

Here they are (before touch-up) next to my glasses to give you some idea of size.  They measure about two and a half inches high.

The stairs below are the finished product after a bit of a tidy up.

Modern cameras are too 'powerful' for pictures of a lot of things I think.  My point-and-shoot is 16 mega-pixels and I don't like the resulting photos half as much as the ones I used to take with its predecessor (8 mega-pixels?).



I think they are far too detailed and show every little scar and blemish, especially at this scale.  They see more than the naked eye does and records it for posterity.  All I can say is that in real life this looks just fine.  Wish I'd buffed them though!

Come back tomorrow to have a look at my plans for the roof.