It's kind of funny that I should enjoy building structures since I work on them everyday for my living. I suppose it may be that there's no heavy work to be done to a building in 1/87. I guess the other reason is that I get to build whatever I want and not what someone else has in mind. Whatever the reasons, I have a few more to show you.
OK, I've shown you some scratch built paper and wooden structures so here are some experiments I made with styrene. Both Plastruct and Evergreen make clapboard siding in styrene sheets. After I've drawn my building and printed out the Manila patterns, I can easily transfer these to the styrene for cutting. I have been using the Tichy windows and doors as well as some scratch built doors for these structures. I like the delicateness of the Tichy and Grandt Line pieces as well as the fact that they are styrene and I can use a solvent glue to fasten them into this type of structure. After all of my walls are cut out, I glue .060" square styrene rod to the corners and rake on the gable ends. This gives me something to butt the next wall to as well as serving as the corner board for the siding. It's then a simple matter of gluing the walls together as seen below.
The door opening here was made by constructing the jamb and trim out of a piece of 90° styrene angle that makes up both the jamb and the trim. And here's a view of the finished structure which is a boathouse that exists on Mooselukmeguntic Lake in western Maine. You might recognize the standing seam roof here again as I said you would earlier. The '37 Chevy pick up is a resin kit from Sylvan Scale and the boat motor is a cast metal piece from Innovative Designs.
The municipal pier workshop at the very top of this posting is also a styrene scratch built structure built in an identical manner to the boathouse. I've added some wood doors to the jambs built as explained earlier and a small wooden office to one end as well as a small lean to shed on the other. Here are a few more of this diorama.
I was very fortunate recently to have Rick at Comstock Carshops send me one of his newer releases. It is a tractor barn kit of cast resin and I had a lot of fun assembling and finishing the building and setting it on a small diorama. The fit was good and there were some very nice cast metal details that came with it. I can only recommend that any resin parts, or cast metal for that matter too, be washed thoroughly before assembly and painting.
You might notice the bales of hay inside the front doors. These are simply correct sized blocks of wood that have been covered in white glue and rolled in hemp shavings from an old rope. I took the liberty of adding my own wood doors to the kit only because I wanted to leave one open and the kit doors weren't finished on both sides. Here's one last photo with the barn in the background that has nothing to do with structures but I just wanted to show this little cast metal kit wheelbarrow from Banta Model Works.
The last structure I'd like to feature here takes us back full circle to a plastic bought building. This was sold as Shultz's Garage by DPM originally that I turned into an abandoned truck sales and service center. There's not much happening here anymore and the place has been boarded up and posted. Notable in my changes to the kit are a shingled roof, the boarded windows and a section of wall that is supposed to appear as if a window had been bricked over.
And with that, I'll say goodnight and thanks.
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