Lets go round again (part three of the elevator saga)

So last week we left the grain elevator ready to be painted.

Justifiably proud of my work. I was determined to give the paint job my best shot. So I washed the model and even gave it a coat of primer. Then I set to and painted it. The result is below.

I was distraught. Once again I'd made a real pigs ear of the paint job. I feel it's so bad I don't even want to show it. But it happened and you followers need to know the full story. So after I had picked myself up and sought advice from fellow T scalers at "talking t gauge" I decided to strip the paint off and start again. Alas, my inexperience stripping paint let me down and even though the paint came off quite nicely the styrene softened and the model began to separate. So, once I had picked myself up yet again. I set to and built another one. Below.
I have to admit I'm very, very nervous about painting this one.

Favourite waste of time (part two of the elevator saga)

Once I get into a project there can be no stopping me a times. This elevator is a case in point.

Fridays are my half day at work. Once I arrived home I set to and started work on the model.

I felt that I had a grand start on the model and decided to continue with it. I found an excellent Flikr site for Grain Elevators and leafed through that making a note of what a proper elevator looks like and adding bits and pieces here and there to my model. So that my model, though not an exact copy of any one elevator has the look of a typical midwestern grain elevator. I added a couple of extra lean to structures and clad it in .64mm V groove styrene sheet. Here are a couple of views of the progress so far.

(the T scale car is there for a size comparison and also for the auto focus of my camera to hold on to, it didn't like the plain white styrene)

I'm definitely very very happy with the way things are looking. The happier I got the more I did to it. The doors in the lean to structures were formed by cutting out the holes for the doorway and then rotating the cut out piece through 90 degrees so that the vertical planking of the doors contrast with the horizontal planking of the structure.

I started working on the project about 1pm or so and finally finished the session at about 8pm or so. With a 20 minute break for dinner. It's difficult to quantify the exact construction time spent on the model so far. But less the research time spent looking at pictures there has to be close to 7 hours spent on the model to this stage. A figure that I find difficult to believe. Strangely my wife has no trouble believing it. At least now most of the work is done. The next report should see it finished.

Loving an Elevator...

I know you lot. You'll all be expecting me to post about the construction of my T scale doodlebug given my last post on the subject. But you'd be wrong. Oh so terribly wrong.

That would be obvious.

Never do the obvious. So instead I set out to build a grain elevator.

Why a grain elevator? Well, they are pretty much an integral part of the scenery in the Midwest. If I'm going to model a Midwestern railroad scene in T scale there will have to be a grain elevator in it. Another thing is that they are pretty simple looking structures. So they have to be easy to build.

There were plenty of pictures in my new book on the M & StL Railway so, using the dimensions from a drawing in the Kalmbach book "Lineside structures for Model Railroads", I set to and started.

The great thing about working in T scale is you can't ever take everything for granted when making a structure. These things are so small (even this elevator is no more than 2" high) it often pays to look around to see it there is anything that you can use as a short cut. With this model I started out to build a shell of 5mm foam core board. Thinking that would work for the distinctive front profile. This I then covered in a paper wrapper that I printed out on the computer. It kinda, sorta works.

It kinda, sorta works. A bit more care in the assembly would help. But the walls are too flat they need some relief, some texture. Look at this wooden sided elevator in Estherville IA by way of a comparison.

So there were two courses of action open to me:

One: learn how to create that sort of texture on the paper wrapper, or;

Two: Build another one out of embossed styrene. So that is what I did.
I just happened to have some .75mm "V" groove embossed styrene that I could try as an experiment. So I built a shell out of some 1mm styrene sheet and then quickly cut some section of the embossed stuff to cover some sides to see if I liked the effect.

Which I did. It's a tad overscale to my eye. So I'm going on the look out for some .5mm embossed sheet. Which should look better. All in all, for a first serious attempt at a US outline structure it's a pretty good start. Good enough to keep me going.

Time to be amazed (again)

Once again, it's time to be amazed. This morning a package arrived from Hobby search. It was my three building kits. Excellent delivery service. I even had to sign for the package. 

I ordered these to help me gauge the style and architecture of Japanese buildings for when I build my own structures for the layout. Here's a picture of just what was in the package.

You can see each kit contains several buildings, houses or tower blocks. The mouldings are clean and tidy. What sets these kits apart is the details. They have interiors! You can barely see them. But there they are. Detailed interiors. Beds, sofas, cupboards and tables. All painted. One of the tower block kits even has a metal fire escape for an exterior wall. Amazing. I could never hope to do that on my structures. But they've chosen to do it. It's like looking at the trains for the first time. You know these things are small but you just can't be prepared for how small they really are. Perhaps it might be possible to illuminate the interiors with fibre optics so you could show them off.

As you would expect the kits are simple. They go together perfectly with a minimum of cleaning up edges with a needle file. The interiors line up on a plastic rod supplied and with a couple of dabs of Testors plastic cement they are done. I did 5 structures during the second half of Stoke City v Chelsea on telly just after I took delivery of the kits. They are certainly more than adequate to be installed on the layout and I will be using them as guidelines for making my own later on. 

So lets finish this entry with a gratuitous shot illustrating the small size of the structures.