Breaking The Silence

I've been a bit quiet of late, what with the holidays and the general business of life, but I haven't been totally idle with The Bureau.  So as we trickle towards the 2,500 mark I thought I'd better get back on it and bring you all up to date.

Morris progress

Well really there hasn't been any progress on the Morris Quad itself, unless you count a bit of green paint splodged on the few pieces I'd stuck together already.  I intend this to be for North Africa but I read somewhere that the interiors were often left in the bright green colour they came out of the factory with, which kinda makes sense from a time and motion point of view.

Mmmm not got very far with this.

But what I have managed to do is make progress with is the ammo trailer and 25 Pdr.

Surprisingly odd way to have the barrel made up by Airfix mould makers but it looked ok in the end, I guess.

The actual Quad kit is more fiddly than I had originally anticipated and perhaps I would have been better waiting for the Plastic Soldier Company's quick build option which I'm sure will make life far easier.

Boxing Clever

Despite a lack of progress with kit modelling I have been enjoying myself turning this

Into this (so far)

I was inspired by the work of the chaps over at Irrational Number Line Games who posted their exploits on TMP and I recognised the box as one I'd seen lying around one of the floors in the office a while back.  So after some hunting around the deserted areas (more on that later) I unearthed one and so had the basis for my own North African/NW Frontier/Afghan/Mexican adobe complex.  So whilst SWMBO is watching her soaps or drooling over Poldark I can have fun cutting and sticking on a little table in the lounge, that way I am being sociable by being in the same room (even if she does roll her eyes at what I'm doing).

I intend to do a bit of a tutorial on this build so wont ramble on too much about it here, but.......  
If anybody has a good way of coating the walls to give an adobe effect please let me know, so far I have pva with paint or tile grout and I'm really not sure about either.

Scavenging

So as I sort of alluded to above we have deserted areas in my place of work because they are shutting the site down having slowly eroded the numbers over the past few years until they could trigger an occupancy review and move us 25 miles down the M6/M61 to our Bolton office (which is actually a business park in Horwich).  So my journey to work goes from sub 20 minutes (normally 17 or 18) to north of 45 minutes depending on the great British motorway system.  From office views of playing fields, the grounds of a stately home, a few houses, a golf course and then fields

to offices, dual carriageways and a football ground with the retail park just beyond 

What a stunning view!

Home of Horwich Trotters FC

From lunchtime walks with views like this:

Lunchtime walking route

Kite surfers on the Ribble Estuary

To walking round one of those cloned retail parks which could mean I could be anywhere in the country and wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Cloned retail park

Anyhoo our top dudes and dudesses, in their infinite widsom, thought this would be a spiffing adventure and we'd all love it.  The upshot is that our office block is now about 1/3 empty with piles of old files and other stuff, there is even an area of stationery that we can help ourselves to and permission to 're-purpose' furniture.  So amongst the various files and folders, pens and staplers I've liberated I have also been collecting some little bits and bobs to build some more adobe buildings from.  Will be keeping my eyes open for more stuff as it empties more, especially as we're going to be one of the last teams out.

I've also got my eye on some cabinets to sort my garage storage out, along with providing me with some gaming/modelling storage.  The kids loved their 'new' top notch office chairs as well.

And finally, a new little friend for the Bureau from my holidays, all the way from Athens.

Twit to woo