THE MAN CAVE
For the man cave design the thought was from the start to encompass some sort of rocky exterior to the endire set.
Early experimentation demonstrated that a larger amount of size would be necessary to at the very least fit all the features in semi-comfortably as well as provide a rocky exterior that was also going to be structurally sound.
It also became clear that doing the wall ‘s interior in a monochrome colouring wasn’t going to work given the large amount of shade already dulled the interior, nor was a natural rock style going to suffice firstly because of structural reasons, but also due to the same monochrome dilemma in addition to it making the cave look a bit more rough and textured than really worked.
In the end I decided to expand the dimensions a little (which are always good to keep down if possible for display purposes) and go for a bright multi colour smooth brick interior. There are various features built in to the walls so they may be adorned with various objects and the colour of each brick has been specifically set so that the variety and mix of colours is as wide and diverse as possible given the selection we then had in hand.
The floor was tiled for the most part with a red carpet leading up to the bar in the middle. For the bar itself (bearing in mind that this was a candy bar) we decided to go with classic bar colours, using dark brown for that wooden bar finish with dark green tiles for the leather on the top of the bar. The lollies and candies adorned the back and two candy machines were specifically built into the wall as the highlights.
To the right of the bar was the most challenging aspect of the design to conceptualise and produce and this was the Scalectrix Track. The fact that it was the major feature of the set that had been requested meant that it had to look convincing at a very small scale. Doing the cars themselves seemed out of the question so I focused on the track design. I ran countless thought experiments but nothing I could think f seemed to work. As always I was reluctant to search out designs online as their influence might result in plagiarism so I continued to work on the problem.
I got excited when I came across the idea for a single train track and actually went to the shops where I remembered seeing train track accessories for sale, but it turns out these days, all the tracks are sold with sleepers and all and there were no single tracks available. The only old ones were really long and also totally unsuitable despite the fact that the design for them was perfect.
Finally I stumbled across the idea of using bars (which i’d been experimenting with), in combination with Lego hose pipe as the curvature seemed essential to add authenticity to the design of the set. I’d also briefly experimented with the track running around the whole cave, but it was just too intrusive upon everything else.
So the design for the slot car set was finished, wheels were added to the walls, a black leather couch was designed that had wheels on either side to once again re-emphasise the car theme which ended up taking almost an hr by itself to find the right parts and was relatively complex given how long I expected it to take.
Finally a massive tv screen was added along the back wall for gaming and other nerdy/techy related activities and custom Brick Yourself game controllers were added as well as various sweets and candies.