Up To Scratch?

Having finished the basic structure of my first scratchbuilt building in the previous post, I got on with doing the roof and painting it. For some reason it didn't seem worth doing separate posts for each stage so I'll just take you through the whole process in a single post. Anyway, lets start at the end with a shot of the completed building (remember the gap under the door is so I can sink the building).

Hopefully you'll all agree that this looks a lot better than it did in the previous post! So how did I turn the rather tatty looking shell of a building into something that while not perfect I'm still fairly proud of? Well it all started with a triangular needle file.

One of my main concerns, which I didn't mention at the time, was that at the corners the brick courses didn't match up very well, especially where you could see the edge of the plastikard sheet. I'd tried to fix this using a scalpel to cut the courses into place without much success. Fortunately Martin picked up on the corners in a comment and pointed me in the direction of a triangular file. Quite why I'd not thought of this myself I don't know, but just two minutes with a file and the building looked a lot better.

Once I'd sorted the corner joints the next job was the roof. I started by fixing a piece of cardboard in place to form the base of the roof before I moved onto figuring out how to add the tiles. My approach to covering the roof in slates was to follow the ideas described by David Wright in his book Making Rural Buildings for Model Railways. Unfortunately I made a couple of mistakes which would come back to bite me later. Essentially the approach involves drawing out slates in strips onto card and then cutting part way into each strip. This means you can lay an entire row of slates in one go as the join between them is hidden by the next row placed on top. I decided to use Princess Slates which are apparently 24 inches by 14 inches in size. Now I don't know how much overlap there usually is between two rows of slates but the book suggests a third. Unfortunately I misread this as a half so the rows are closer together than they should be. I also made the mistake of using normal copier paper for the slates. The problem with this became obvious as soon as I sprayed on some primer. Essentially because I'd applied the tiles as strips and the thinness of the paper the gaps between adjacent slates kind of disappeared. I carried on with painting but we will return to the slates later.

Basic painting followed a fairly simple pattern; a base colour followed by some dry brushing and a black wash. The roof used dark sea grey (Model Color #991) followed by a black wash and then dry brushing first with a little Dark Blue Grey (Model Color #904) and then black. The walls were painted first with Weathered Stone (RailMatch #2426) before a black wash and then dry brushing with khaki, brown sand, dark sand (Model Color #988, #876, and #847), and black. At this point you can see the problem with the roof tiles quite clearly, but I carried on regardless.

With the basic painting done I turned to the details, specifically the door and window frame. I was originally going to go for a dirty white for the window but Bryony suggested a worn and faded blue paint used everywhere might look better. The base coat was a 4 to 1 mixture of Flat Blue and Dark Blue Grey (Model Color #962 and #904) with then a light dry brushing of more Dark Blue Grey before a black wash to really make things look dirty. I think this has worked really well, although in retrospect the window sill maybe should have been modelled as stone rather than painted wood. Having essentially finished the building at this point I came to the conclusion that I really wasn't happy with the roof.

Unfortunately because I'd built the model as a single piece it wasn't possible to remove the existing roof, certainly not without damaging the painting I'd already done. So instead I simply laid another layer of slates over the top. This time I made them from 220gms card and ehile they are much better they still aren't perfect. Next time I might do separate slates instead of fitting a row in a single go.

The problem with the extra layer of slates was that the roof was now quite proud of the side walls. To hide this I decided to add barge boards which I cobbled together from some 0.5mm plastruct strip. I used a file to roughen the surface slightly to try and imitate wood grain although I'm not sure how successful that was. They were then painted in the same way as the door and window frame before being super-glued into place. Annoyingly after fitting them I realised they were possibly a bit short; the cowboy builders have struck again! At this point I also added a sill above the door from a short piece of right-angle plastruct which I think adds a nice little touch to the door and helps to hide the edge of the plastikard sheet.

Now usually I leave glazing windows until the very end as I want the "glass" to be nice and shiny. In this case I wanted the windows to end up looking as if they hadn't been cleaned in years, so I used Micro Kristal Klear to add the individual panes before I wafted over a light layer of matt varnish to seal everything in place. Looking at the final model I decided that the guttering was too pristine so toned this down by dry brushing a little London Grey (Model Color #836) over the metalwork and then a second coat of matt varnish made sure the windows were nice and frosted and the paint well sealed.

As I said at the start of this post the building is far from perfect but I'm really happy with how it has turned out and the amount of things I've learnt along the way. The next building is bound to be much better given my experiences here. This building was never destined for my layout so I think I'll build it a little diorama as an excuse for more scenic experimentation rather than simply throwing it away.

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.

Cobbles or Setts?

If you can remember back to February then you'll unfortunately be able to recall my first rather poor attempt at modelling cobble stones. In the comments to that post GB also pointed out that a cobbled street is usually paved with irregular stones, whereas setts (which are what I've always called cobble stones) are made from regular, usually rectangular, worked stone. While my approach to modelling cobble stones improved until I was happy enough to produce a small photographic diorama the fact remains that I've been producing regular circular stones which are neither cobbles or setts.

Part of the problem has been that producing regular circular stones using the ink tube from a biro is easy, but I couldn't think of a similar way of producing rectangular stones. Yesterday I realised that I should be able to build a simple stamp from some of the styrene strip I have kicking around. Essentially I built a rectangular tube from some 0.5mm thick styrene (Plastruct #90729) held together with plastic weld from E.M.A. Model Supplies. Once the weld had set I filled down the joins and the styrene to thin it a bit below 0.5mm leaving me with a stamp I could use to make rectangular stones of approximately 3mm by 1mm which represent 9 inch by 3 inch given that I'm working at a scale of 4mm to the foot.

Armed with my stamp I produced another small test piece using DAS clay as before, which was then painted in the same fashion as my previous attempts.

I think these setts look really good, although those between the rails (which is where I started) could be better; not sure if I should put them in the other orientation to those outside the rails, or just not offset each row as two bricks (i.e. 6mm plus the gaps) are a good fit between the rails? So now I have a decision to make, cobbles or setts? I think the setts are more realistic as the cobbles are too uniform, but let me know which you prefer in the comments.