Quotes

Life is short, break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly. Love truly, laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile. - Samuel Longhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)

Friday, January 3, 2014

Calamity - Newspaper Office - Final Assembly

I'm just about done with the Newspaper Office for Calamity. I glued all the walls together, added some interior and exterior trim, finished the false front (almost) and built the roofs. Time flies when you are having fun and last night was about 4 hours worth of work. Everything just seems to take up more time than I think it should. But, the building is finally coming together all that is left to do at this point is finish off some things I missed, touch up the interior paint and paint the exterior.

Here are the pictures from last night, along with a little commentary:


First walls up on the main building, using the new magnetic clamps


Adding the first side wall to the main building

And the magnetic clamps aren't working as well as I hoped they would. Had to resort to my brute force steel blocks

Roof support added to the false front

Time to build a roof

Roof supports and some extra plastic sheet for strength

Tar paper added and first strip of shingles on

Finished the shingles on one side, moving over to the other

Shingles are done, just need the ridge line pieces.You can see them in a little pile just above the roof.

And the ridge is finished. These are the O scale Shake Shingles from Wild West Model Builders.

The front, just needs some trim and the ornamental supports for the top. Couldn't find my package of supports last night, I'm sure I put them in a "safe" place.

And with the roof off, shows off a bit of the interior. I'm seriously considering lighting at this point but I can't find a source of Hurricane style lamps. Probably overkill anyway.

The first wall and floor for the addition. See how the board and batten style siding will still be seen where the original exterior wall and rear door are incorporated into the addition.

And the addition is basically finished

Overall look at the building from the single window side. The blocked alley will likely come as a surprise to some poor unsuspecting outlaw, the locals will know all about it though.

And a view from the other side. The paint work on the exterior of the rear wall is an experiment using Liquitex inks for the weathered undercoat of the building. In this case, a drop of white, a drop of black and a drop of raw umber. I like the look but the ink is hard to apply straight up. I'll have to add some acrylic medium to it.

Test fitting the roof. Sigh, failed on the measure twice cut once. Its not quite covering the sides of the building. I'll have to figure out a way to fix this.

The building with trim added. Hard to see here since all the plastic is white.

Rats! I forgot the baseboard trim in the main building.

Trim is finished, roofs are finished and in place. Looks a little hodgepodge at the moment with all the different materials being used. Painting will bring it all together.

And from the other side. The little nook here in the back should be a good ambush spot.
Well, I'm not quite as finished as I thought I was after I looked at the pictures. Need to fix a few things and then I can get some paint on this one.

11 comments:

  1. Its getting there. Just really need to fix that roof.

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  2. That does look the biz, love the roof shingles!!

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    1. Thanks Ray. I think its going to look pretty darn good on the board, well when the boards get built. :-)

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  3. Looks great. Sorry if I missed it, but where did you get those cool clamps?

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    1. They are Rite Way Magnetic Clamps and I purchased them through MicroMark: http://www.micromark.com/rite-way-magnetic-clamp-system-for-ho-and-o-scale,11073.html
      Ordinarily they do the job very well, but the board and batten siding on this building didn't make them as useful. The gap between the front and back of the clamp was to big. In most cases they work really well though (inside their design parameters anyway).

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  4. Looks fantastic, although it makes me wonder why you even bother with the MDF laser cut stuff...

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    1. Its an issue of time. I love to scratchbuild but I probably have 20+ hours invested in this structure and I can't populate an entire town that way. So I build MDF Laser cut stuff to fill in the supporting cast of buildings and spend time scratchbuilding the "main cast" as it were. Which means I'm probably going to go back and build the railroad station instead of using the one I have already built. I just have to decide what I want to spend my time on. Eventually maybe all of Calamity will be scratchbuilt but I don't want that to keep me from using it for games. So I'll replace a little at a time if I decide to go that route.

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    2. Scratchbuilding only the "hero" buildings makes sense, but at a certain point, your scratchbuilds look so much better than the other buildings that the MDF is going to look pretty sad on the same table. Maybe if you made the "supporting cast" with exteriors only?

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    3. Well, for the most part most of the mdf kits are going to get a lot of extra treatment so they shouldn't look to bad against the "hero" buildings (I like the phrase!). If I figure out a way to light the buildings I probably won't light the supporting cast buildings.

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