After trialing segments of mesh around the curve of the island's walkway, I found the appearance was not satisfactory as the silver spray paint pealed away and the mesh wouldn't fit properly. An alternative representation of this mesh will be speckled clear acrylic. Similarly, I found that my initial tubing for the rubber bumpers was too thin to fit around the lip of the wood whilst maintaining it's roundness. I have had to buy thicker plastic tubing and paint this with black acrylic as the spray paint would not stick to it's surface. Another issue we found was with the thickness of our acyclic rod as it is one millimetre out, affecting the size of the holes through the walkway support beams and the triangular piece at the centre. This means the support beams plans had to be re-drawn and the triangular piece re-made.
Successes so far include cutting the redrawn clear acrylic walkway supports on the laser cutter and fitting them into place along the rod. We then glued strips of styrene along the bottom of these pieces to re-create the t-bar shape along the edges. half of the walkway fence pillars have also been cut into veneer as they are far too delicate to cut accurately by hand. Once these pieces have been reversed on the computer drawings and laser cut, we will stick them back to back with the others, leaving a small gap between by inserting one mm of veneer between them as on the real ones.
Things that are not going accordingly to plan include the number of layers of primer on the support pillar, requiring over ten coats before the wood grain has started to fade from sight. Another set back is the styrene strip I glued around the island as cracks appeared in the filler before it came completely away at the end. Paul has resolved this by sawing this top half off and making another segment altogether one mm smaller than the bottom parameter. The styrene strip will be glued to this to sit on the bottom half and will hopefully not come away again.
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