A Monumental Achievement

My wife grew up in Gettysburg, PA. The national park there has hundreds of impressive monuments to the Civil War battle, and I've been inspired to try to make a miniature replica of one of them. Most of them are way beyond my current ability, so I settled for starting out with a simple "plinth," which is what they call the heavy base for a statue or memorial. I will probably eventually mount something onto the top of this base, like a miniature figurine. Here is a link to a list of the monuments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_of_the_Gettysburg_Battlefield.

Normally for materials, I like to use the Palight ProjectPVC board, but this time to get the scale I wanted, I would need to use material only 1/16th of an inch thick, and I don't have any Palight that thin. Cardboard is available that thin, and I considered that, but then decided to use wood.

One of my goals for this is to figure out how to make details like various kinds of moldings and shaped edges. With edges only 1/16th of an inch thick, my plan was to sand the edges into a "chamfer" or bevel shape. That's one of the reasons I went with wood rather than posterboard. I just ran the edges of the wood panels, at an angle, along 320 grit sandpaper.

For the thicker sections, I used blue foam, so I used white PVA glue to join the foam to the wood sections. I found it a little tricky lining everything up so the various panels were square with each other.

Once assembled, I sealed the foam and wood with a mix of paint and PVA glue. I hoped that would conceal some of the grain of the wood, and it did help a little.

So this was a good start -- maybe next time I'll tackle a more complicated monument!