THE SCHOOL PROJECT...

Boy 2, our 8 year old, has been given a project to do over the Easter break.  He has to do a study on a mountain. It could be a picture, a poster, some interesting facts... but no, our little guy has decided he wants to make a model.  Proud dad moment :-)  He knows about Helvellyn (Lake District, UK, 3117 ft) because I've enthused about it, having climbed it a few times. So he's decided he wants a model Helvellyn to take to school at the start of summer term next week.  Time to get out the styrofoam and hot-wire cutter again...

After a bit of googling for source material, I had something to go on...

I printed out an enlarged OS map of the contours for Helvellyn, scaled to fit on one of my 12" square hardboard terrain bases.  Boy 2 then carefully traced each contour line, making sure each one was a complete circuit (it gets a bit tricky under the wording on the map).  Then I followed my previous procedure for transferring the contours onto styrofoam.  Draw round the outermost contour, then carefully cut it off; draw round the next contour, then carefully cut it off; etc, etc.

Below you can see the completed contours 1 and 2 (there are going to be 11 in total on this one!)  -  which introduced another problem.  My styrofoam is 1" thick (25mm).  If I were to make each contour 1" thick, the whole thing would be 11" high.  For a 12" square base, this would be a rather ridiculous vertical stretch.  I couldn't be bothered with doing the maths to get the correct thickness of contours for the base size I'm using, so in the end I just decided to saw each styrofoam block thickness in half (not an easy job to keep it straight with a handsaw) to give each contour a thickness of approx 10-12mm (I did wobble somewhat).  The whole thing should now be only 5 and a half inches high when finished, which is a lot better, but still too high.  However, this is a primary school project, not a to-scale model of the whole lake district... hmmmm.... a to-scale model of the whole lake district.... now there's an idea..... :-)