Cowboy Builders

As a slight change from building locomotives and rolling stock I decided that I'd have a go at turning some of the 4mm scale Slater's embossed Plastikard that I bought back in July into a small building to see how well it worked and how exactly to use it. My original plan had been to build a cardboard shell and then to cover it in the plastikard as this would make a nice rigid structure. Unfortunately I suffered a severe cause of cowboy builder.

I spent quite a while drawing out the parts on the computer and made templates for the four walls in 2mm cardboard and then four walls in the plastikard to match. Unfortunately I managed to get the sizing wrong when going from the shell to the outer layer. Having cut out all 8 parts it was clear that they wouldn't go together, but it was also clear that the 2mm cardboard was too think for the wall depth I wanted, given the door and window parts I had to hand (these are from the PECO building components pack, part number LK-78). Rather than trying to redraw the cardboard shell I decided, given it was only a small test building, to just use the plastikard without any reinforcement. So I set about joining the walls together using plastic weld from E.M.A. Model Supplies.

I'm still amazed at just how strong a joint the plastic weld creates, and once all four walls were joined the structure is remarkably solid. While the window frame fitted nicely I decided I needed a little more depth to the door. This was easy to achieve by simply adding some 0.5mm plastruct strip around the door frame using more plastic weld (note to self: make sure the window is open wider next time you use this stuff). There is a gap under the door as I'm intending the bottom few millimeters of wall to be underground so the building won't appear to float.

The rest of the bits you can see are all more sections of plastruct. There are some 4mm square sections used as roof girders to thicken the side walls and give me somewhere to attach the roof. The gutter is 2mm half round and the drain pipe is 1.3mm rod; I drilled a hole in the half round and slotted the rod in to make a nice solid joint.

The next step is to sort the roof. I'm going to experiment with adding separate roof tiles so it might take a while, even though it is only a small roof. Once that's done it will be on to painting, which will hopefully hide some of the more cowboy builder aspects. For a first attempt it's ... well if I'm being honest fairly terrible. Terrible it may be but at least I'm learning things that will be useful for the next attempt.