Turntable progress

Continuing with the turntable build, I made the king posts and bracing out of stripwood instead of styrene, both because I found it easier to shape the wood to form the tapered posts, and because that's what I had in stock. The center posts are scale 12x12 stripwood tapered to 9x9, and the side posts are 10x10 tapered to roughly 8x8.  The braces are 4x6 stripwood. Here they are installed:

I colored the turntable before adding the hardware, using the same combination of weathering powders and India ink/alcohol wash that I used for the deck: after masking the deck, I sprayed the turntable with grey primer, and then gave the entire thing an I/A wash.  I then painted on weathering powders with a soft brush, using Monroe Models' (formerly A.I.M.) "grimy black" with a little "medium earth" brushed on top.

After the entire turntable was "painted", I brushed on another I/A wash to smooth out the texture and introduce some variation in color. The neat thing about this technique is that you can control how much of the color you remove - for example, on the bracing I removed most of the powder to reveal some of the grey underneath, as if the braces were made of untreated wood while the other timbers were creosoted.

I added the pads that the truss rods will run over, but still have to add the truss rods, turnbuckles, and something like 68 NBW castings. But that's for another day...