What's in this Box?

I was digging around looking for a set of shingles that I know are sitting around here somewhere when I came across a box. An old beat up, ugly box. This looks like something that should be thrown away, but I should check it first.

Well I was a little surprised by the contents as inside is a Citadel Miniatures monstrosity called "The Juggernaut" from the Arcane Monstrosities line #810300 (I'm guessing that's what's on the instruction sheet). I have no idea when I acquired this one. As a nostalgia piece its very cool. I think trying to assemble it is going to be a nightmare.

I ran through the instructions and the components and it looks like something they refer to as stub axles are missing. Looking at the kit as a whole you would probably better off replacing these with brass anyway. Not sure if I want to hang on to it (I'm slowing trying to downsize) or put it up on eBay. The more I look at these pieces the more I think I would replace everyone of them with brass rod. I might even be tempted to replace the gears with brass ones if I could find replacements. Just musing though.

If you know someone that needs one of these send them my way, I'm will to enter into discussions.

The only thing that appears to be missing are the stub axles. Based on the box and the instruction sheet I'm pretty sure this is an original kit as opposed to a recast.

Building Calamity 12 - Row House #2 - Even More Paint Work

I started off giving the airbrush a thorough cleaning. It seems to have worked as it performed like a champ through every color I worked with tonight. Hopefully it will continue to work that nicely tomorrow!

I started off by making sure I had a good base coat on the building and eliminating that mottled look I  managed to pull off the other night. I then applied to lighter coats to start the fading. I followed that up with the yellow trim and then faded the whole thing with white and started to dirty things up a bit. Oh and I also installed the doors and windows. A good night's work. I'll set this one aside for a bit. I need to build the roof and then I'll go in and do the weathering once I have that done.

Solid base coat now

A bit of faded paint

I taped down the windows and doors before I hit them with the airbrush

For some reason I can't get the yellow to show up properly in this shot. I didn't want to go in and mess with color levels though. You guys will just have to live with it!

Painting the trim. This a 1:1 mix of two new colors from Reaper; 9407 Lantern Yellow and 9408 Candlelight Yellow. I think these are going to be part of the Bones line of paints. Great yellows!

Doors and Windows are installed and I have faded the paint and then gave it a quick wash of Raw Umber to bring out some of the details. I'll let it sit at this point while I build and paint the roof. I like to weather everything together, mostly because its messy.

Building Calamity 11 - Row House #2 - More Paint Work

I was able to sit down and get a little bit more work done on Row House #2 last night. Well more than a little bit as I assembled most of the pieces last night and now it looks a lot more like a house. Once again I managed to forget to do something before I applied paint. This time it was gluing on all of the exterior trim. I had framed the front window early on but completely forgot about the rest. With the base coat in place I had to go back and do some scraping around the edges to expose the bare foamed PVC so I could get a good glue bond. I followed that up with a little brown paint work and sealed everything up again.

At this point I had the airbrush working just fine. After I assembled the building I decided to apply the first coat of green paint, something from Vallejo Model Air which should have shot through the brush just fine. I sort of finished the first coat and then sat down and had another frustrating session of cleaning the airbrush.

Here are the results of last night's work.

Everything has been given a sealing coat of matte varnish. Its readily apparent that I forgot to add the trim at this point.

This is how I help get the trim straight. The flat edge against my metal blocks (you can see where I scrapped paint away to get to the foamed PVC)

The trim strip glued in place on the wall with the upper edge running against the metal blocks to keep it straight.

Time for a little assembly. You can see the lighter brown I used for the trim strips. I didn't feel the need to be to careful applying it either. Big rubber bands are quite helpful here.

Assembly completed, all the trim painted and the windows blocked off to protect the inside from over spray

I dropped in some heavy watercolor paper to further block the over spray from going over the top edge. You can see from the mottled appearance of the green that I wasn't getting good paint flow from the airbrush...again.  Will have to go back and give the airbrush another thorough cleaning and hope that I get better results at the next session. 

Building Calamity 10 - Row House #2 - Exterior Paint

Some nights it feels like I just don't seem to accomplish anything. I spent a lot of time cleaning and re-cleaning the airbrush and really it still wasn't really working right by the end of the evening. Something is stuck somewhere but I can't figure out what it is, just not getting a good smooth air and paint flow from it. I have cleaned it and re-cleaned it and still nothing. Oh well I'll figure it out. It was working well enough to get this part of the work done.

I finished the floor and the exterior walls with the base coat. I'm hoping this will show up really well when I peel the top coat of paint away. It still needs to be sealed with a matte varnish before I can apply the chipping fluid, hopefully I can work that in tomorrow.

Airbrushed base coat for the exterior

Airbrushed interior floor

Adding some depth with Raw Umber ink

Building Calamity 9 - Row House #2 - Initial Progress

I made a lot of progress on different projects in November, I'm hoping that trend continues into December. I decided to start off with the second of the two Row Houses for Calamity. Again I'm not sure if these will make the final cut on to the board. They are larger than I had anticipated. But they are useful testbeds to try different building and finishing techniques on.

I originally cut the pieces for this house at the same time as I did for the first one. Of course that meant that I repeated the same mistake I made on the first one as far as the size of the openings I cut for the doors and windows. I was also vowed to stick to the order that's really necessary to avoid doing a lot of interior painting after its assembled. To make this one different I wanted to use wallpaper rather just bare planking so I left the interior side of the pieces smooth. The first thing I discovered was the paper I intended to use was just to thick so I had to scramble for an acceptable alternative, in this case some of the pages out one of my moleskin books. Its about the right color but its probably a little to thin. I'll have to drop by Michael's or Hobby Lobby and go through the scrap book sections again to find some suitable patterns or even just blank white paper that's the right thickness. I have a file of wall paper patterns but I'll have to be sure to scale them down a bit. Most patterns that I have seen used have a pattern that printed out to big. The patterns are scaled for dollhouses and a much smaller version of the pattern is necessary for my buildings or it will really dominate the walls. 

[Dollhouses are typically scaled out to 1/12 scale (1" equals a foot) so they should be reduced to about 25% of their actual size which really only gets us down to O Scale or 1/48.]

As I figure the owners aren't into frills this building gets plain wall paper on the walls. It ended up wrinkled in a couple of places and a few bubbles. Initially I tried to smooth these out and then I decided to leave it, it adds character and shows that the roof probably leaks as well. I might go in and add some streaks from water stains. Along with the wall paper I decided to add a chair rail all the way around as Doug suggested during the work on Row House #1. I wavered on adding an interior wall to make it into a two room house but decided against it. I think I will have plenty of opportunities to work with interior walls in future buildings.

I have completed the interior with; wallpaper, chair rail, baseboard trim and painting. I'm going to add some painter's tape over the openings and along the edges so that I don't get overspray  from the airbrush on the inside. Before I move forward with the exterior painting though I'm going to add the exterior trim and paint the front and backs of the doors and windows before I add them to the walls. I may go ahead and paint the exterior flat without the doors and windows and see how that goes.

I'm dry fitting what I have at this point. You can see that I have already trimmed out the big front window in this picture. My steel blocks are probably the best tool I have purchased for these builds.

Since the blocks are square I can use them as a straight edge. Here I'm using them to help get the chair rail in position and, hopefully, straight as well.

Looks like the chair rail lines up pretty good across at least three of the walls. After the glue had set I trimmed the excess off that crosses door and window openings.

I went ahead and painted the chair rail early on, it just made it easier to see and I didn't have to be to neat with the paint.

Here I have applied the wall paper using the chair rail as a guide. I should have let the glue set longer as the edges were pretty rough from the trimming. I wasn't to concerned though as I would have to removed the wallpaper from around the edges so I could glue the trim in place.

Here I have removed the wallpaper from around all the openings. It looks quite a bit neater at this stage.

Interior trim in place

Interior trim painted. Before I start work on the exterior I will give this a shot of  matte varnish to help protect the paint work on the trim.

The other thing that I toyed with today was the concept of lighting the town. A couple of friends thought that I could probably make a could portion of each kerosene lantern or lamp from beads, along with some thoughts on how to make that characteristic bulge in the glass. If I go forward with the lighting I'm likely to need upwards of 100 lamps for the project so they need to be relatively cheap and easy to build. I delved into the beading/jewelry world a bit, its a scary place.