The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 4 - The Bakery, Calling it Done

I'm finally wrapping up this build. The weathering is pretty basic and there is no signage but since I don't have a layout ready for it I don't want to go any further with it. Since I don't know if this will be a foreground or a background building I have left myself an out by making the roof removable. If you look at the back you will see a spot on either side of the roof line where there is a gap in the trim. On top of that the smoke jack has been left removable. This way I can rotate the smoke jack out of the way and slide the roof out. Underneath the roof is the ceiling which slides straight out the back.

I managed to spill glue on the front windows and had gone ahead and installed them anyway. I then decided that I couldn't live with them like that and managed to pull them out. I cut four more and I was going to reinstall them when it struck me that it would be easier to put stuff in the front windows if I just left them off for now. So the four new panes of "glass" are currently residing in the "attic" and I'll install them when I'm ready to finish the building when its installed.

Here is what I ended up with.

My favorite 28mm Prospector (approx 1/56th scale) is a bit undersized; 5' tall in O Scale and a whopping 7' tall in S Scale.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 4 - The Bakery Getting Closer

I had to work my way through a couple of issues with the back wall. In the end I decided that to keep things from warping and trying to keep it square it really needed to be glued into place. I left a small gap in the edging on the back so I can still pull out the roof and the ceiling to get to the inside and add lights if and when that becomes something I want to do.

At this point I need to finish the roof and add the smokejack for sure. I'm contemplating adding knots to the wood, just not sure this is the building I want to practice that on.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 4 - The Bakery Will it Ever be Finished?

Work slowly continues on the bakery. I think its approaching completion but time keeps slipping by and days can go by without any real progress.

Here's where things stand at the moment (and actually there has been some progress since I took these):

I really messed up the "glass" in the windows so I pried it out. I have some good plastic to replace it with but I still need to cut it to size and reinstall it.

For the blue trim I thinned down some Reaper Void Blue so it would go on like a stain.

This is prior to some of the framing but I did apply a wood greying wash to try an tie things together better. It did help ease some of those color transitions so it looks better than before.

At this point I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with this back edge, since the rear wall is removable for the lighting it makes for an interesting problem to solve. Not to mention that the damn wall started to warp on me so I have to figure out a solution for that as well.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 4 - The Bakery Still Under Construction

As I stated previously life has changed and we are still struggling around schedules and getting everything back in a balance. We have made a couple of decisions that have really required a lot of focus to pull off. Anything I have been working on has seen very little progress, but I finally got the siding on.

The back wall will actually be removable so I can slide out the roof and the ceiling to mount lighting circuitry up there.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 3 - The Market Finished Finally

2025 has not been the greatest year for us. Dealing with the estate of a loved once can be grueling especially one as complicated as my Mom's. I found this particular kit to be a difficult build, the thin plywood didn't leave a lot of surface area for glue and a number of the sub structures were a bit fragile until assembled. I made the two roofs removable, this will definitely be a foreground building and with those large windows will need some serious interior detailing. I finished the inside walls and floors from textures I bought from Clever Models.

I have only lightly weathered the building at this point, more weathering will happen when it actually gets installed on the layout. As with the other buildings the base is only temporary at this point. I have no idea how these will fit into the scene yet so I at least wanted a finished base to protect the model until it gets to the layout.

There were a lot of mistakes made on this build, some of which were pretty basic and I became quite frustrated with it. At least once I considered just junking the whole kit and seeing if I could find another one out there. In addition there were a couple of missing frames which included the corbels from the front ( I have some on order but they haven't arrived yet) and the base for the front porch. I also managed to install some clapboard upside down and fogged windows with the CA. I would like to build it again, but Stoney Creek kits are a bit on the rare side.

Once again, I 'm using my 28mm Prospector from Reaper Miniatures to provide a little sense of scale.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 2 - The Boot Shop - Finished

I realized that I never showed off the finished pictures of the Boot Shop. Now a guided tour lead by your favorite prospector: 

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 3 - The Market

I have snuck in fifteen minutes here, fifteen minutes there working on this particular kit. This is the Market, part of the Stoney Creek Designs Crossroads Collection, a series of kits that were not part of his limited edition line of kits. This one is obviously based on the bakery in Silver Plume Colorado. However, the door way is squared off rather than the angled door on the original. Other than that its pretty darn close, by the way Banta Modelworks makes a version of this particular building as well.

I have run into a lot of issues with this kit, several self-inflicted, some by actually following the instructions. Because of that I'm doing a lot more dry fitting and trying to make sure everything actually fits. I think the biggest gripe with these kits is the 1/16th inch thick plywood that makes up the basic shell. Its really quite fragile during the construction phase. And those windows, they are huge! And I really messed them up, enough so that I think I'm going to try and find another unbuilt kit and try it again.

Obviously this one is not done, but since I can't seem to actually post anything I thought I would get something out there.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 2 - The Boot Shop

This is another building from Crossroads Collection, Roger Malinowski's effort to have a line of basic kits that he would always have in stock as part of the Stoney Creek lineup. Like the Gun shop this one features a couple of different types of construction and weathering techniques. 

Like the Gun Shop my intention is to have interior details and lighting to be added later, but that means that there are changes the need to made to the building itself to accomodate those things. The major change on my part will be the roof which needs to be removable.

The most unusual feature of this kit is the use of thin walnut for the side and rear walls. These walls are built up board by board on an inner carcass of 1/16" plywood. This includes adding on battens to cover the gap between the boards. Tedious but worth the effort in the end. The issue I had was with the "painting". In this case with oil pastels. It looks good but the difference between the walnut wall and the basswood batten is pretty dramatic, mostly because instead of going with the as built white I went with red.

Progress has been steady, so here are a few photos of the progress:

The side and rear walls, battens applied on two of them and the third I'm getting ready to start.

The Roger Malinowski Tribute Part 1 - The Gunshop

I have been missing in action for the better part of the month, not intentionally but sometimes the days just fly by. I have been slowly working through a couple of projects so things have been happening but life just got in the way of actually blogging about anything. I couldn't even keep up with Cartoon Wednesday! On the plus side the garden is in and we didn't have a hail storm right after we finished like last year. It did take a lot of time though.

So recently I discovered that Roger Malinowski had passed away from cancer all the way back in November of 2022. I only found out when I visited the website for Stoney Creek Designs to see if there was anything new. I have been slowly accumulating his kits for years and have about a dozen in the cupboard waiting to be built and my intent has always been to build them not collect and resell them. There are still 3 or 4 that I would like to acquire but the prices have gone through the roof if they come up for sale at all.

That leads into my decade + fascination with On30 and the search for the Bachmann 2-8-0. Recently I have managed to acquire not 1 but 2 of these engines and have been scribbling designs for a small (ish) On30 layout to run them on. This would not replace the D&RGW HO layout (which is set in the late '50s) but would share the same basic space so it has to be something I can take down and store away when I need to scratch the HO scale itch. At this point this layout will, primarily, showcase the Stoney Creek Design kits so I anticipate operations being somewhat limited with a focus more on scenes and photography those scenes.

I figured I could, at least, go ahead and start putting together the kits on hand so I opted to start with one of the "easier" kits; The Gunstore from the Crossroads Collection. This series of four kits were not limited editions like his regular line of limited edition kits and his intent was to keep them in stock. I didn't really take a lot of pictures of this build so I'm just presenting everything that I have in somewhat the correct order.

I used Clever Creek Model texture files for the floor and walls on the inside.

The basic building finished and the roofs being test fitted.

Shingles!

Tar paper on the back addition

The finished building sections. The white door is the interior door from Grande Line (now owned by San Juan)

A look inside. Since all the models will be up very much in the foreground I want to be able to detail the interior. That required modifying both roofs to be removable. I also plan on adding lighting.

From the front. The miniature is a prospector figure from Reaper Miniatures. Despite being a 28mm Heroic sized miniature he is still on the short side maybe 5’4” or 5”

The base is a piece of gatorboard. It’s about 1/2” wide all around the building and only has some basic scenery completed. The front porch is scratch built from coffee stir sticks.