Monday, February 28, 2011

Barrel & Marble Works: Roofs installed

Title tells all I guess. I spent sometime cutting the substructures for the roofs and paneling them.

The roof pieces are cut from 0.040 inch sheet styrene. They are sized so that the overhang at the eves is about 1 scale foot.
Campbell Scale corrugated metal stock was also used to panel the roof. In this case though, I made use of the full 12 foot length of the stock and didn't cut the pieces down to 8 feet as I did with the wall siding - the width though is still 4 feet. It does seem weird: cutting up the stock into 4 foot pieces and them gluing them all down again on the substructure. The difference is that the individual pieces, when glued side-by-side, form slight ridges that help give the illusion of individual sheets - which should be enhanced when painted.

All the panels are glued down with thick super-glue. I'm moving on to adding the defunct mill substructures to the roofs.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Barrel & Marble Works: Finished wall paneling

A couple of weeks ago I received my order of Campbell Scale metal siding from George's Trains, and I have spent some free time finishing the wall siding. The siding I bought was 12 scale feet in width, so I first cut 8'x4' pieces from the stock and used that to panel the walls. I used thick superglue to attach the pieces to the styrene substructure.

As I paneled the walls I added the window and door castings once paneling on a wall was finished. The castings were primed with Floquil concrete paint prior to installation.

If I were to do this project properly I would have panelled the substructure prior to assembly, but I decided to not do too much preplanning. The next part is to add the roof, but on this part I will panel it with metal siding before I attach it to the roof.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Ancient Egyptian house models

Tucked in a corner of the vast ancient Egyptian display at the Louvre we happened upon this elegant display of model buildings. By the time we came across these little models we had already put hours on our feet touring the magnificent collections and were looking for some rest, so I unfortunately only did a drive-by photo and didn’t examine the labels. I’ll have to see what I can find on the internet. Maybe there is an ancient train set that goes with them :-) After seeing example after example of their incredible creativity and skill, I wouldn’t put something as simple as a toy train beyond these master craftsmen.