The site model from hell...

It may look like were having fun -- but trust me, its all sarcasm, this site model was the most ridiculous thing that I have ever worked on

Part 1. It took us (and by us, I mean me) 7 - yes 7 - trips to the woodshop to get our wood to get cut by the CNC router - communication from the woodshop manager on how to set up our computer files to get it to cut properly was the blame on this front, thanks a lot Pete Bru....not

The material we chose for this was good and bad, mostly bad -- but hindsight is always 20/20. We though we could CNC this easily, but because of the thickness of the material (only 3/16" thick), and its 'wavy' properties to not lay real flat, the cuts and etches we had programmed into our computer file failed, it was cut in some areas and not at all in some other, a real pain in the butt. 

So then, we had to layer our wood, allowing for enough thickness for the CNC to work properly. Ugh Thats Part 2.

Part 3. The most annoying of parts -- now that we were stuck with a bunch of deep cuts in our wood, we had to fill these with something, unfortunately because of the material we used ( masonite) we couldn't fill the holes traditionally and then sand them, so we had to think of other solutions...ugh

First idea -- fill the cuts first with some wood glue to take up some space before we go back over top of the dried glue with some wood filler, because just filling the cut with filler first was going to be too time consuming because of how long it took to fill the hole.

This didn't work. wood glue was too slippery when dried.

Second idea -- add some pipe caulking over top of the dried glue -- This didn't work either, the wood glue was again too slippery when dried.

Third idea -- rip out all of the glue. This sucked, and took a lot of time, and then fill the cuts with pipe caulking. This worked, but like i said, very time consuming. We were all really pissed at this point.

Once we finally finished all of these stressful parts, the easy part came -- at least for me. Set me loose with power tools and let the man prop this bad boy up! Since our site model was gigantic, about 8'x 9', we had to split it into 3 different pieces in order to fit it through doors and such. So our pieces were the two different sides of the river, and the river piece in the middle. These pieces had to be propped up accordingly, with the two land pieces higher than the river piece, for obvious reasons. Needless to say, this was the easiest and funnest part of the whole site model build, thank goodness it was last....