Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Mounting windows and Doors

This is step that has been a long time in coming and I'm reasonably pleased with the result. Before I started mounting the windows and doors I took a hard look at the sills and lintels. I think the original pieces were to thick and some where decidedly less than "square". I opted to try and reduce the width of each to 3 "bricks". Of course cutting caused some issues with the paper and there were a number of tears, mostly shallow but in one instance I ripped out almost the whole section between the 2nd & 3rd floor windows. I was able to take some of the leftover paper and cover these offending sections up and you really can't see the patches. It was certainly tedious and I'm facing the same situation on the street side wall.

I used super glue to mount everything in place and putty (vallejo in this case, because I had it) to fill the gaps from the backside. I need to find something to impress some detail into the sills and lintels, still scouting through my parts box for something at this point. That is the nice thing about this particular PVC sheets it takes impressions really well.

At this point I had finished trimming all of the lintels and sills to be a bit narrower (3 bricks or about 9"). While most of the ripped paper is pretty small, you can see the large tear on the right side between the 2nd and 3rd story.

At this point I have finished the "patches". I simply took some of the left over brick paper and either replaced the entire area or just cut single strips of bricks and glued everything in place. I'm pretty sure that it will pass muster at this point as its hard to pick out the patches even when you are looking for them.

At this point, I have shortened up all the lintels and sills a bit, they just looked to wide before.

Just another view of the mostly completed wall. The only other thing I could add at this point is the decorative band between the first and second floors. Everything else will have to wait for final assembly.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Painting Doors and Windows

Another week of trying to fit in modeling makes progress very slow. With the walls basically finished I felt like I could spend time getting the windows ready. While I tried to be as precise as possible I figure there will be some shimming necessary to get good fits. There are 30 tall 12-Pane double hung windows, 12 short 12-Pane double hung windows, 2 display windows, 1 double door entrance and 3 sets of warehouse doors.

Most of the components are from Tichy, but the smaller 12 pane windows are Grandt Line. I cleaned everything up and headed to the spray booth. I mounted everything with double sided tape to popsicle sticks and then glued those popsicle sticks to the top of the cheap lazy susan I use as a spinner in the booth. I primed everything with Badger Grey Stynylrez grey primer, followed by a brown (Vallejo Panzer Aces but the label is to worn to read the actual color) and then an off white (Vallejo Panzer Aces German White Tanker Crew).

Now everything is ready to install into the walls, just need to find the time to do it.

Popsicle sticks glued to the spinner. There is so much paint built up over the years that they can be pried off without to much effort

Everything in place with double sided tape.

The final color an off white, I would almost call this an antique white.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - Sills and Lintels

Work progresses slowly. Over the last few days I cut out sills and lintels for the rail and street side walls. There was frustration there as I simply could not get my NW Chopper to cut accurately. Cutting all those small pieces took longer than expected. Everything seemed to be going okay as I glue the pieces into place but for some reason everything seems to be just a bit off kilter. I'm not happy with the result at this point, but I'm going to continue to move forward. My next step, before I do anything else, is to apply a layer of dullcote. As I was cleaning a brush a large drop of water hit the street side wall in the upper right corner, I'm beyond upset with myself at this point. So when I get to another working session the airbrush is coming out. Hopefully that will stop any other water accidents from taking place. My new rule for working with paper is to seal it before I glue to to a substrate, both sides of the paper!

Rail side

Street side

Warehouse Row - Building 1 - Exterior Brick Finished

I was able to finish getting the rest of the brick paper glued on and the windows and doors cut out. This was on the creek wall and the street wall. I'm not happy with the creek wall right now. Somewhere an error crept into the measurements and the buttresses are not centered correctly, that is going to bother me a lot. Hopefully I can disguise it a bit with some exterior details and weathering. On top of that it looks like the buttresses are not straight up and down. I have checked it with my square and measured the gap between them (9' in HO scale) and that measurement is the same all the way up and down. Right now I'm chalking that up to a perspective issue. On a positive note the creek wall cannot be viewed straight on, it will be angled away from the viewer so whatever mistake has crept in shouldn't not be noticeable to the casual viewer.

Creek wall before cutting out the windows. Looks pretty good here.

Creek wall after cutting out the windows. This is where it starts to look out of kilter.

Street side wall ready for some decoration.

Warehouse Row - Building #1 - More Brickwork - progress

Lots going on around here and I haven't found a lot of time to work on Building #1. This is the accumulation of more than a few short build sessions.

There is still an awful lot to do and I'm trying not to rush to the finish so some of the little things that have cropped up aren't as frustrating as they could be. First off running out of blades, this thing is eating blades so I broke down and bought a big pack of #11 blades, it should be enough to see me through this build.

Here are where things stand a the moment:

Rail side wall. Needs sills, lintels and a concrete band,

Alley wall, just needs the lower brickwork, stonework and a door.

Alley wall from the inside.

Inside of the street wall, cuts are pretty rough at this point. My blades were starting to get dull. Not to concerned since viewing the inside will be tough.

All four walls, in this shot I'm gluing the buttresses on the creek side wall.

Looking at the street side wall before the windows were cut.

The rail side with everything cut out at this point.

A sanity check that everything is still fitting together.

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.

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.

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.