Page 17 - March April 2017

styrene - have all been prone to warping. By carefully designing return walls as bracing you can usually overcome most problems of this sort. However, I have had a few disaster cases where a major structural intervention has been necessary in order to save both the model and the modeller from being basket cases! A good example is the Blue Ridge Summit depot which I lovingly started and then abandoned for about 8 years because the whole floor structure had badly warped. I was finally able to rescue it after thinking of building major downstand beams and using long machine screws (complete with washers and nuts) to pull the diagonal warping out. The machine screws also double up as electrical conductors for the wiring to the interior light bulbs.
Perhaps this is the place to add that having lovingly built your model building, don’t forget to bury it! That’s right, don’t forget to bury it. When did you last see a real building sitting on top of the ground? More than likely most buildings you’ve seen come out of the ground because in real life they have foundations (and in America might even have that down in the earth toy train heaven - a basement!). So build your building with foundations that can be sunk into a hole in the scenery and have the scenery go up to the building rather than have the building perch precariously on the top of the scenery. Of course it’s also a good way of securing models from accidentally being brushed off onto the floor – a familiar and not unknown hazard on my layout.
Most problems I’ve experienced with warping seem to have been caused by bonding finishing sheets to backing materials. With glue or solvent applied to only one face, the (normally) thicker backing material inevitably tends to warp.
My first scratch building project was the Highfield train order office. I used milled wood – Kappler Mill & Lumber Co. scribed siding. I had difficulty working out how to brace walls and get the wood glue I was using to dry fast enough to make reasonable progress. Another problem was cutting the wood. Keeping the wood firmly in place without damaging its scribed surface while sawing it with my X-Acto razor saw was a problem. Priming and painting was a further problem for me. I found the surface went very slightly fuzzy at first and the scribing was tending to get clogged up with paint. I also used Grandt Line injection moulded black styrene window castings cemented in place with Walthers Goo (a contact adhesive might have been better). I used card for the floors and roof. To form the roof I overlaid the card with scribed styrene sheet but with the scribing facing down to give the roof the appearance of gentle undulations of a rather old corrugated roof. I’d built my first scratch-built building.
The second project was going to be really different - a big 100 feet long brick freight shed. I’d read of an English technique to model brickwork. Just take some card, draw parallel lines 10mm apart, apply a small amount of white wood glue and gently place individual ‘bricks’ in whatever brick bond you want 3 high per each 10mm gap using old fashioned computer card punchings or ‘chad’ as it is evidently known. The Worcester, England scenery company, Green Scene, sell chad. This is a lovely, therapeutic technique that allows great flexibility in creating brick structures.
There are 4 drawbacks that come to mind. First – don’t sneeze or cough or your bricks will go everywhere. Second – this is not for the faint-hearted. This is a technique that takes time. My first tiny bit of wall (under 2 inches square but with two window openings cut in it) took me about 2 hours! Third – getting the chad the right way up. My stock of chad is printed on the back and it’s a real drag getting it the right way round. Fourth – it’s bigger that it should be and therefore not strictly in scale. Having said all that, choose the card
for the wall carefully. The colour of the card becomes the colour of the mortar. When the chad has dried thoroughly simply wipe wood
stain over it and stand back and be amazed. I used Colron Peruvian mahogany wood stain which gives a lovely brick colour for deep red bricks. The roof is card overlaid with overlapping tiny pieces of tissue paper to represent tar paper.
These first two structures were done years ago. Now, some 30 structure projects later, I generally prefer to use styrene. Why?
I finally realised that the major problem that had been holding me back from being able to build the scratch built buildings that I wanted to build was the problem of finding suitable windows and doors from the different ranges of existing castings such as Grandt Line or Alexander Scale Models. While these are excellent castings (and I’ve used them), they don’t allow the same degree of flexibility that scratchbuilding your own windows does if you want to capture the spirit of a particular building.
Windows in buildings are like eyes in people, they’re an essential part of the building’s ‘face’. So it’s worth taking trouble to get them right and to get the detailing of framing around them right, too. Light scudding sideways across the face of the building will pick out these details. And if they’re not there, the building will literally look flat in both senses of the word. Well-detailed windows will bring a building to life.
The thought of scratchbuilding my own windows was intimidating but it has turned out to be the most liberating factor in enabling me to tackle any scratchbuilding project I want. I no longer have to try to match available castings with the prototype I’m trying to model. I used 0.020” x 0.020” Slater’s Microstrip to form glazing bars, sash stiles and meeting rails. The good enough factor obviously comes into play here.
But now new technologies have opened up endless possibilities. Laser cutting and 3D printing are two that come to mind immediately.
Drawings of doors and windows in Autocad or Adobe Illustrator can be emailed to specialist modellers who willingly create lovely scale doors and windows posted to your home and ready to insert in to your latest project. And they do look lovely!
Laser cut doors and windows for model of Western Maryland Railway’s Blue Ridge Summit, PA passenger station
I find it easiest to use styrene for most of my structure models. It’s quick because to cut it you just score the styrene sheet with a scalpel knife and snap it and you can ‘weld’ different pieces together quickly using solvents. Be careful to use a well-ventilated space and avoid splashing solvent in eyes! The other thing I really enjoy about styrene is the availability of a wide range of cast sheet materials such as Evergreen siding and Wills Fine Cast materials. By carefully choosing sheet and cast sheet materials, one can create a wide palette of different textures to replicate an array of building materials.
A comparatively recent development are self-adhesive, flexible and easy to cut sheet material in beautifully moulded and gently coloured ranges of brick, tile, stone, wood and paving. One European make readily available in the UK is Redutex. This has enabled me to ‘clad’ a cylindrical tower in fish scale tile hanging which looks terrific. Although the model is HO scale, I’ve used N scale Redutex sheet.