Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Railside Wall Brickwork

I'm moving on to the railside of building #1, where everything started. I had previously "bricked" the inside of this wall and added supports for the floor. This has created a fairly significant bow. I'm hoping that by adding the brick to the exterior side that I'll pull the wall back to being flat, fingers crossed.

The buttresses for this wall are ready to go so I decided to mark off the wall for those areas that are going to receive some decorative treatment so that when the time comes I'll be gluing to the PVC foam rather than to paper. Pictures tell the story better than me.

Checking to see how much shorter the buttresses need to be.

Marking off the "no glue" zones.

Laying out the brick.

Applying glue and weighting down the brick walls. Left the area for the buttresses bare so I can use Gorilla Glue for the buttresses and hopefully pull the bow out of the wall.

Glue has set and ready for the buttresses. Note on the lower left brickwork how nice and even the color is.

Buttresses being glued on with Gorilla Glue

Buttresses have set and aren't going anywhere. Bonus the wall is now flat again!

Started cutting out and folding back the brick for the first window. This is going to be very tedious. And note the color shift when you accidentally let a drop of water hit the paper before you have sealed it. That nice lower left brickwork is now stained and, bonus, only part of that will be cut out because that's a large window there and not a door.

Cartoon Wednesday

 

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Buttresses rail side

Still working through an assembly order in my head and still trying to move forward with the building. I decided that it would be safe to go ahead and see how the buttresses would go together. These are the wider pair on the rail side of the building. Pretty simply really, just apply glue to the substructure and hope that the paper adheres properly. Things, so far, are working like a charm. After I let the glue dry overnight I folded the edge to see if it would appear sharp and it did! Then I applied glue along the edge, applied clamps and I'm back to waiting for glue to set.

Just a quick look from the back. Glue has been applied and I'll trim the excess off later.

Flipped over to show off the brick.

And the clamping begins.

Looking good at this point, except for that stain where I laid the glue on to heavy. Some lessons are hard to learn.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - More brickwork

Another hour or so at the workbench with Building #1. I really need to decide on a name at this point, especially since I'm starting to contemplate interior details that might be seen through the windows with the lights on. On the layout this building will be on the back row and a lot detail many not necessarily be necessary, however, this one is on the edge of the left side of the Cherry Creek module so it will really be a foreground building as someone moves around the layout.

At this point I'm trying to determine if my wood glue will hold the paper firmly to the PVC. After cutting out one window I think this will work pretty well. I did let it cure for 24 hours to make sure the glue had completely set. The paper didn't delaminate from the PVC as I cut through the paper with a knife (a sharp one this time) so I went ahead and cut out all the 4th floor windows and cleaned up the edges, gently, with a file. I did some dry fitting and adjust the window openings as necessary.

After that little exercise I went ahead and glued brick paper on the remaining sections of the wall (except the top, missed that and did it later). While I was waiting for that to dry I went ahead and doubled up the thickness of the buttresses for this side of the building.

My intent is to cut the paper down the center, more or less, of each opening and fold the paper back to brick over the sides. It will work just fine but it really should be done from the front and not the back. So I cut the paper completely away from the window openings. You can pick out a couple of stains where I must have applied the glue a little thick and it affected color. Probably should be using white glue rather than Titebond, except that I buy Titebond by the gallon for the wood shop so I have lots of it.

After the cutting but before the clean up. the paper didn't delaminate even after I did some, gentle, filing to clean things up.

Starting to glue the rest of the brick paper on the lower floors.

Everything, except the top strip, in place and draying. I only keep the weights in place for a couple of hours but I won't start cutting for 24 or so to make sure the glue has fully cured.

And this oddly edited photo is the two buttresses being glued up.

Cartoon Wednesday...on Thursday

 

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - A little brickwork

 Work continues today. I wanted to experiment with the brick paper, I figured doing that on the inside was probably the best course of action. I finished cutting all the window and door openings with various degrees of success. Like any project I should have changed to a new blade right away and instead I managed to do a lot of tear out on the inside all. Not to worried about that as it getting covered up and wouldn't be visible anyway. The first strip is going down with wood glue just to see if that is a reasonable adhesive for this. I'll do the next strip with double sided tape but that's for another day.

Here is the front. As you can see I didn't make the window openings large enough (not quite sure how that happened, I had the castings right here) and had to lengthen the openings a bit. I did decide to go with two freight doors opening on to the loading dock even though there is only enough room for a single boxcar to deliver raw materials and take away finished goods (whatever that might be at this point).

The interior side. I cleaned up the tear out a bit but you can see the worst of it along the middle row (3rd floor) of windows. That's when I switched out blades. The 2nd and ground floors are much cleaner cuts.

The brick strips cut out and ready to be glued or taped in place. This is the point when I realized that my floor supports are nearly straight enough. Again lack of visibility will hide a multitude of sins in the construction.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Floors and Windows

Still moving forward, albeit slowly. I started gluing supports for the floors on to the inside of the walls. Then, of course, I ran out of the styrene I was using so I moved on to something else. I figured maybe it was time to actually try and cut out some windows and see how that would go. Actually it went surprisingly well. This particular version of PVC is not quite as hard as the Sintra brand. That made cutting out the first set of windows quite easy. The downside is that you can practically dent this stuff just by looking at it. It makes it a reasonable choice for substructure but definitely has to be covered with something. I also wanted to make sure that the wall was thick enough. I'm happy with how it looks at this point. However, in the last photo I put one of the buttresses in place and it looks to thin. I may need to double up the thickness of these to make them look right.

The back/alley wall floor supports

The rail side wall floor supports

Windows cut out and test fitted (yes, I cut the openings to short).

A closer look so you can really see how deep the windows are set.

And with a buttress in place. It looks to thin compared to the depth of the windows.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Floor Experiments

I need to think a few things through on the walls so I turned to the floors. I'm including floors because my intent is to light this structure. I really intend to light every structure on Warehouse Row to at least a limited extent. That means floors which in turn will also be the ceilings from which lights will need to be suspended and I need to figure out how to rout the wires. At this point I'm researching options but LED lights are what I'll be using one way or another. So floors are mandatory.

I dry fitted the walls again this time with a piece of paper underneath and I traced out the floor template from that. This created a floor template based on the interior dimensions of the building rather than the exterior dimensions from the drawing. I cut out the template and then cut out five pieces of 1mm foamed PVC for the floor. I printed a couple of sheets of flooring from my Clever Models purchase and got ready experiment on how to glue paper to foamed PVC. Since Gorilla Glue work so well for the walls I figured I would try it on the floor. The issue being is that you need one of the two surfaces to be wet for Gorilla Glue to bond. Since the new inkjet printer has ink tanks rather than ink cartridges I was hoping that may the color wouldn't be affected as much by being wet. I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves at this point.

Paper Floor Template, perhaps cardboard would have been a better choice but this worked just fine since all I really need to do was mark the corners.

Four floors and one roof ready to cut out.

Ready for experimentation!

Wooden floor texture from Clever Models

Weighted down for the glue to dry. I can already see the ink doing a color shift, at least its not running.

And the final product. A decided shift to green where the water came all the way through from the backside. The Gorilla glue worked but if this was anything other than a warehouse or factory floor I would probably toss it. Its unlikely anyone will notice the color shift through the windows and if they do it will just look like a stained industrial floor. I think I'll try wood glue next.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Wall Work - So Many Walls

Layout continues with the other walls. Well mostly continues, I ran out of time to work on this and just kind of threw things together for the creek and alley side walls. Will have to finish them later. I also deviated from my original drawing for the windows on the creek side. The Tichy windows I bought were pretty big and felt out of proportion to the rest of the windows. I was looking through my reference shots and realized that most of the buildings in Lodo featured smaller windows on the now street sides of the buildings, so I swapped in some Grandt Line masonry windows that are quite a bit smaller than the Tichy ones I was going to use.

14th Street side. This is the main entrance and the larger window will be a corner office. Since the window is so large I'll be adding an interior here.

14th Street and Wynkoop Street sides, side by side. Note that I have added additional buttresses at the corners. I felt that the corners looked a little odd without them.

The creek side with the smaller windows. Again, this is just roughly laid out. I need to go back and add the guide lines.

The alley side. This side will not be visible, so I'm not sure that I'll actually install the windows and door on this side but this is what it might look like.

Now I have a whole bunch of pieces, just like a kit!

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Wall Work - Break out the Rulers

Time to start laying out doors and windows. I grabbed the heavy duty ruler to hold the walls in alignment and started drawing in the guidelines for cutting things out. While working through this process I discovered that the back wall slipped a bit during the gluing process and I missed it. Fortunately the gap is really small and its on the back wall so its easily dealt with. I just had to make sure I was measuring from the actual bottom edge of the wall so things lined up properly.

I also cut out the two buttresses for this rail side and they look pretty good.

Putting in the lines

Slipped edge on the alley wall

First sanity check with the doors and windows. Looking pretty good.

Added the buttresses. Pretty common style in the lower downtown area of Denver.

Cartoon Wednesday

 

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Wall Work

With the arrival of a couple of care packages, direct from the "factories", I have all the windows and doors that I need. For this first building I wanted to try brick printed paper for the walls. I decided to try the brick paper from Micro Mark because I could also get sheets of pre-printed arched windows and such. After receiving the brick paper I was not happy with it. Although its described as aged factory brick, it actually looks pretty pristine and that's not going to work. Hopefully, I'll be able to use it on different project. Thinking quickly I managed to convince my wife that we really needed a color printer and I was able to purchase I higher end inkjet printer. And then it was off to the Clever Model site to pick out some textures. I'm pleased with the resulting prints so the light is green to continue!

With parts in hands I started to build the basic shell. I'm using 2mm foamed PVC sheets and this really isn't thick enough so I'm laminating two sheets together to get the proper thickness. As I getting ready to cut things out I figured that I could make assembly a little easier by making a rabbet at each edge. In theory this should make everything a little easier to line up when I assembly the walls...we shall see.

 

I used a really thin layer of Gorilla Glue to laminate the pieces together. Other than super glue this was the only glue I had on hand that would work on foamed PVC. I have discovered that the foamed PVC I had on hand was really soft and dents really easy. Next time I order some I'll be sure to get the Sintra brand which is not quite so soft.

I made sure I use plenty of weight on the walls to make sure they stayed stuck together!

Time for a little dry fitting. These are the rail side, street side and ally side walls being held in place with my 1-2-3 blocks and some smaller 90 degree blocks that I have hanging around. I need to determine how long the angled wall needed to be so I could laminate it together.

Sanity check with a handy boxcar. Proportions look pretty good.

Here I'm measuring both the length needed and determining the proper angle to cut the edges at. This side will be facing the creek (i.e. Creek side).