A "living hinge" is of course not alive. It is a way of cutting flat stock to create flexible curved 3D shapes.
I have a highway that extends throughout my layout. The roadway is supported on "concrete" piers that are made from 2" Styrofoam cut in "pill"-like shape to resemble concrete piers. The foam is attached to an inner wood core that is then use to support the vertical columns. The entire pier is painted in a concrete color. Also, the texture of the Styrofoam lends itself to the texture of concrete.
So in making some changes to my highway , I decided to do away with the Styrofoam piers and try to laser cut the piers in wood. If the piers were rectangular only that would be easy to make.
However, the piers I want have circular end pieces. Enter, the living hinge. Using CorelDraw I created the following:
The two hinge portions are shown as a series of red lines.
Once laser cut you have:
The hinge is totally flexible it can than can be wrapped into my curved end pier shape around the top and bottom forms to have this.
This will be glued and the hinge filled in with light coating of wood filler, then a top cover piece will be added and 3/4" diameter tubing will be used as the supports ( in the holes) and all will be painted a concrete color.
The living hinge will be great for tunnel portals too, to add depth to stone tunnel entrance front.
