One of the nice things about early 20th century industrial buildings is that even the most simple buildings in terms of purpose were often built with great care and thought to their architectural details. This makes modelling them a fun challenge, as there are a lot of trim and details to recreate and paint. At a certain point, you can only do so much with airbrushing, sooner or later, you need to get down and dirty with fine paint brushes, and eventually powders to finish making the buildings look real and a part of the landscape.
With this in mind, last weekend while watching the 12 hours of Sebring IMSA car race and the Hindsight 20/20 #17 Virtual RPM (nothing like long events to give background to puttering), I broke out the airbrush to finish the Canadian General Electric windows, and then started the trim. As you can see below, it makes a big difference in making the windows and walls look like more than just painted plastic sheet.
Canadian General Electric, before painting the last windows, masked for painting, and after the stonework is picked out.
The other building that was ready for more work was the Barrymore Fibres building in the corner of the layout. This was a building I tried a new product on, a laser cut paper brick. I am still not sure how well it will take things like a mortar paint, but I think that now that it is painted, it will take pan pastels to help soften and blend things, and that will be good enough for the building.
Barrymore Fibres building of Toronto Carpet, going from blah to popping with windows and stonework painted (the windows were previously airbrushed before last weekend).
Every layer of colour and paint adds to bringing the buildings to life. Still lots of building to do, but every step forward brings me to the inevitable need to get off my rear end and finish drawing the windows for the main Toronto Carpet Building so that I can get masters printed and cast the resin versions for building. Then, the challenge of the sky bridge over Mowat Avenue. I can’t wait to get the bridge done and see this corner really come to fruition, but everything in order, and I need to get to a point of putting in the hours drawing the windows in CAD so I can move ahead.
Its a long weekend here, and the defacto half way point of the summer I guess has arrived on us out of nowhere. I have been working on the Hinde & Dauch factory for a long time, and Saturday morning dawned warm, but not humid, and I decided it was finally time to paint it. After long spells of looking at an un-finished, and now an unpainted building, it was finally time to head to the patio and the outside and throw some base brick colour on the building. I have learned as I’ve built my layout, the base colour on a building almost doesn’t matter beyond it needing to be in the right colour family and not too dark. By the time windows are painted, signs added, and the brick weathered and any mortaring done, the colour palate of the finished building will completely evolve. For this building, the paint is a mix of three different Vallejo browns, with some white tossed in at the end to soften the brown. It is the same browns as the part of the factory painted earlier, but a different mix with more of the lighter shades to just give a bit of a difference than the parts painted previously. Buildings and paint on them is not a science, its an art, and I am trying to be less rigid in my work to let creativity flow between paint and later PanPastels and other weathering tools to age the building and show the impact of nature on it.
Base painting on the largest part of Hinde & Dauch on my patio, and then back on the layout.
After painting the Hinde & Dauch factory, I decided to make some progress on a somewhat undecided side project. I have built a 1′ by 4′ frame, and will install a foam base for a diorama. I have some options in mind, but for now, I am keeping options open. I had the sanding sealer from preparing the MDF foundations for the buildings on my layout. This is to help seal the wood and keep it from expanding and contracting in different weather conditions. I will eventually paint the frame, but the project pine from Home Depot I use for these frames, while good, a little sealer makes sure it stays to shape.
Sealing the wood frame for a TBD diorama. Once the frame is ready and the foam installed, I’ll decide what the Diorama will be when I’m ready to build.
Next up, after a couple of weeks, there is the monster masking job to airbrush the windows of Hinde & Dauch, followed by hand painting the window sills and lintels on the windows. I am looking at a couple of new approaches to painting brick mortar lines that I’ve seen in articles, hopefully more on that down the line. This building has more window than brick, but it’s a chance to try things at least. After that, I need to actually get the signs ready for the different parts of Hinde & Dauch so I can put them on after the detail painting. Much to do to keep me busy as it progresses!
So, its been a bit of a break, as you would know if you’re reading the blog, I haven’t written about the layout since May 3rd and my first operating session, the only post about the layout was in mid-June looking back on 5 years since we moved into our house. In retrospect, I needed a breather, I’ve spent a lot of time working on the layout since early 2020 through lock-downs and work from home and all the uncertainties the past three years have wrought. I always thought, when I started the layout, that it would probably take me a decade to build. At the half decade turn, I don’t know if I am ahead or behind that timeline, but I know I’ve spent a lot of hours on it, and now after about 3 months of not touching it, but thinking about it, I found myself on a Saturday afternoon, working on model railroad projects. I was mixing paints and prepping some stuff for the paint booth, reclaiming my work bench from other projects and accumulated debris, and was plowing away on several projects again.
Out of the paint booth to cure, and back on the layout today. Moving forward again. After some cure time, mask the windows and spray them, then brush paint the details and work on finishing.
I did the same today, did some puttering on projects, got the painted building onto the layout to see how it looks with the first pass of paint before any further work on detail and weathering, and generally felt good about my hobby, which is not a bad place to be. On we go to hopefully keep making little steps of working again and moving forward.
Spring if finally trying to be sprung. This means, a couple of layout structures can make progress again! The Hinde & Dauch factory, and Canadian General Electric are too big to fit in my spray booth to paint inside (at least any painting being done with an airbrush!). This meant, that I couldn’t start with a coat of primer to find any areas that needed construction touch-ups, and provide a good grippy base for paint until it was warm enough to take a rattle can of Tamiya Fine Surface Primer to the patio. This lovely Easter Sunday in Toronto provided the first day where it was warm enough and when I wasn’t at work where I could take things out to the patio and paint.
Before and after of primer on the two buildings.
Even outside, safety is priority. A pair of latex gloves and my respirator that I would use at the paint booth inside are a must. The regulator particularly, so, you only get one pair of lungs, I don’t plan on destroying them sucking in paint particles!
Darth Stephen painting on the patio. Gotta protect those lungs!
There will be at least one more day out on the patio painting, I need to do the base brickwork with the airbrush at a minimum, and that will mean bringing the compressor and all the gear out. I will wait a couple of weeks to do that. Rattle canning at 10 degrees is fine, but its just a touch too chilly to drag out all the gear and use the airbrush. I just need to walk the fine line on Toronto’s legendary stupid humidity kicking in!
Edit: Should have waited, didn’t even think. Below are a couple of pictures of them back on the layout after the primer has dried enough to handle and get them in off the patio before and of our neighbours kids throw something onto the patio and smash then! These are done right? I don’t need do do all that work of painting brick, stone and windows and adding signs/details do I?
As I’ve written about recently, I have been working on the small portion of 219 Dufferin Street, the former Canadian General Electric tungsten light factory that makes it onto my layout. There are times I wish I was getting more of all my structures onto the layout because they all look so great, but then I remember that I am scratch-building everything, and only having small parts of buildings makes doing so achievable (its also all that fits on my 14″ wide benchwork!!).
This building is a real standout, lots of different windows and brickwork patterns. In order to create some of the trim on the ends of the boiler house, I decided to make a bunch of masters using 0.020×0.080 styrene strips, and some brick sheet to create the stepped/smooth details. Once I’d made up a dozen, I cast a couple of molds, and cast them in resin. I made two molds as my first one didn’t set great, so I made a second. This was a good call, between the two molds of the 12 master parts, I was probably getting about 15 good parts, considering I needed around 40, that meant three runs of casting. I made an alignment jig from some styrene to aid in installing them, and getting the spacing right.
I wanted to come back to my wall cores that I am cutting with my Cricut. I am, intentionally leaving window openings a bit small when I am drawing them, this means, when the walls are cut, the windows don’t fit. The reason for this, is that the Cricut cuts are not 100% perfect, its much better and easier to make a window opening bigger, than to create material and make it smaller. Once I have the cores together, I take the windows and a fine sharpie, and trace out where I need to carefully trim away material to get the opening. As always, smart work dictates that the openings should always be too small when working with a knife, so that they can be filed to finished size and not made too big. This is of course, a slow process as you near the end, as you want to only just take enough material away. That said, for me at least, its inevitable that some openings or parts of them are not perfect. This inevitably means at the end of a walls construction, there is some filling with putty from the back to close in gaps and make sure there are not tiny dots of light escaping around the windows.
Casting brick details for the tops of the short walls, and showing how I trim out the undersized openings cut by the Cricut in the wall cores.
Once all the many steps of building the walls were done in adding layers of brickwork and detail, I got them assembled and mounted to the base. I built the building in two parts, the main factory end and side walls, and the boiler house wals that are closest to the tracks. Once the two sub assemblies were done, I installed the boiler house at the front edge of the base styrene, and then worked to butt the factory up against it. Filling gaps at the rear against the backdrop is easier than filling a gap at the front which is more visible.
With the walls assembled, the past big part to build is the stone base of the chimney. The chimney is octagonal, and after much searching a couple of years ago, I found a Cibolo Crossing hydrocal chimney. It is a solid part, and rather than trying to cut it to size as its too tall, I designed the square base of the chimney to act as a drop in hide so I could get the height I wanted. This meant though, that I couldn’t just fasten the chimney to a flat base. To make the stone surround, I layered 3 squares of 0.040″ styrene sheet off cuts from building structures, and traced out the octagonal base. I then took my calipers and measured the diameter of the chimney at the height of the base. With that, I then traced a second octagon using the smaller dimension. This would be my cutout to create a slide down frame. To cut this out, I first drilled holes at the corners of the octagon, and a centre point. With the centre point, I drilled out a 1″ hole using a spade bit on slow speed. Once that big chunk was out, using a flat blade in an xacto handle, I started to trim away to my inner cut lines. Leaving the hole small, I started test fitting. As it got it close to size and sliding down to where it needed to be, I switched from cutting to sanding, and using files and sanding sticks, got the opening to size, and flared the underside so the opening was slightly larger at the bottom to make a tight fit on chimney. With it sliding into place, it is now good to go for painting. For now, the base and chimney are being left separate, as they will be painted differently from the rest of the building, and frankly, the weight of the solid cast chimney actually makes the building unwieldy to manoeuvre on the bench.
The Cibolo Crossing cast hydroal chimney is too tall, so I need to make a piece to cover the square part of the chimney as a “base”. Marking, cutting and fitting a layered bock of 0.040″ styrene. Need to spend some time sanding and cleaning up the layers around the edges!
I like going back and forth from the bench to the layout as I scratch-build structures. It helps me see if I am staying in the size of the space, and if I am happy with the look and feel of the building as it comes together. After weeks of work, actually putting all the parts together for the first time and seeing how it looks, is a really rewarding feeling. It makes the hours and the mistakes and the swearing at the mistakes worth it to see something that you have spent all this time on actually sitting on the layout, and looking like you had planner when you started.
All together in position, nothing helping to hold it up. The roof and skylights are separate pieces to allow for painting, and access to install windows after painting.
The building is not quite ready for the paint booth, but that’s ok, as this is another building along with Hinde and Dauch that is too big for my indoor spray booth. I can’t actually get a go on with painting this until the spring, and given March is coming in like a Lion in 2023 with all the snow after a light start to winter, it could be a while before I’m painting it, but getting this large structure off my workbench frees up room for some other projects and work, and raises questions about how on earth I am going to build the biggest structure on my layout in the Gillett Castle of 135 Fraser Avenue. Its 3 feet long, I may have to figure out somewhere else in the house to do the assembly, but since that is likely the last structure to be built, that’s definitely not a today problem!
Mowat Avenue streetscape, now with almost no foam core stand-ins!
While I spent last Sunday cutting building cores for part of Toronto Carpet, and drawing the Canadian General Electric building, I realized that I can’t advance Toronto Carpet until I draw the windows and print the masters for casting. But, CGE is going to be built using off the shelf (albeit with modifications to some) Tichy and Grandt Line windows. This meant, that I can advance this buildings construction immediately, as I need to be in the right mood for the detailed CAD work of drawing windows, which I haven’t been. The mood will strike me soon, but as is so often the case, when I am in a good vein of modelling productively, I want to keep going. The solution, get going on this building.
The render of the finished artwork prior to cutting the wall cores on the Cricut.
I have the habit of identifying things I need, and searching to buy them. I realized that the boiler house extension of the CGE plant has skylights on part of it. From what limited pictures of the roof I can get, they appeared to be different shapes. After a fruitless search online, and realizing that it would only just slow my down, I dove into my storage drawers of windows and found some suitably sized windows that I could use to make skylights. I quickly measured the windows, and figured out the rough dimensions of braces to get the shape needed for the skylights, and cut them on the Cricut. I assembled the windows into blocks which could be glued to the frames, and then trimmed out to make them look the way I wanted them to. Instead of waiting weeks on something that wasn’t what I exactly wanted, In a couple of hours, I had the two built up.
Making skylights for the lower portion of the CGE building, the boiler-house.
Moving on to the brickwork on the walls, I am continuing to push myself to do better. I am not unhappy with any of my buildings, but as I get across the layout, some of the buildings have much more detailed and distinctive brickwork. The longer I look at pictures, the more I want to capture that. This buildings has brick arches over the windows, with stone keystones. I had ordered some arches with keystones from York Modelmaking in the UK several years ago, with their laser cut/etched dogtooth brick that I have used on a number of buildings. The arches are the wrong size for the windows, and I don’t have enough keystones from the set. Again, old patterns and habits die hard, I started looking to order keystones/arches. But literally, the keystones are wedge shaped chunks of styrene…I can make these using my chopper. So I did, using a 0.030″x0.250″ strip, I cut and flipped to make a couple of dozen keystones for the buildings. The N Scale Architect brick I have come to love (thank you Hunter Hughson for introducing me to it) has sheets with trim and curved tops. With this, I could trim and insert my keystones, and make my window arches for the building. Again, a couple of hours work at the bench is better than just trying to throw money at the task.
Working on the brickwork for the walls of CGE. Last weekend at a get together people were teasing about how clean my workbench was in pictures, so here it is suitably dishevelled while I was working last week.
It is a real moment of satisfaction when I toss the foam core or hard board mock-up building and start to see the actual model of a building taking shape. I have been going back and forth with the work in progress from the bench to the layout. I do this for a bunch of reasons, it helps me make sure any size adjustments are caught and made before walls get glued together, and it is really motivating to see a building spring into form as you go. With the large chimney and the brickwork, the back of what you see, a tiny part of the main building is coming to life before my eyes.
Working through the construction, checking fit and adjusting from the drawings to fit the foundation.
Still lots of work to do, but I picked up the windows I need to finish the building this weekend, so over the coming days I can get them prepped and keep on keeping on with the construction.
Musings on my Model Railroading Addiction 