Update - This one is not very upbeat I am afraid - I was hoping to have cracked the cladding last night...and not my mojo

On the high point - after Scott's excellent descriptive piece about china clay dries and Moorswater, I thought I had better redo my homework. Out came the photos of Moorswater then and now and sure enough I had missed off the step in the building to allow the conveyor to pass from one to the other

I think this oversight was because there is a lot of 'kit' outside/attached to the buildings which I thought could be built later once the main building shells were built and clad but this one not so. So out with the scalpel and a few cuts later, a new end wall to the largest building and a modified side wall to the building, which is currently undergoing the cladding options. The conveyer has had to be reduced in length as my building is about two thirds of the prototype, so I tried to keep the angle of it the same so it doesn't look like a ski lift. This will be clad later and steel beams added beneath to recreate the support structure. I also managed to cut a small opening for a doorway which leads to the external structures by walkways.

This is with the modification to include the conveyer...

Scott's note did also get me to requestion what I am trying to achieve here. I knew I could not represent Moorswater in full, and to model all the buildings to exact length would mean losing quite a few elements, but at least if I can recreate enough of it to 'give a sense of place' and that people could recognise it as Moorswater, albeit slightly condensed. So where possible, buildings have been built to scale height and width with only the length being cropped to suit.

Now the low point - taking on board as many comments as possible from before, I redid a cladding test using a thin strip of paper to create a minimal overhang and instead of using strips of horizontal cladding, I cut them into 6mm widths as Scott had noted they were 7 foot by 3 foot panels generally. This has proved more difficult than anticipated as to cut the panels between the troughs, butt them tightly together in the horizontal and try to align the ribs vertically...well let's just say the air was blue last night It didn't even make it to the morning to look at it with fresh eyes because it looked so awful. Not so much the overhang, which is more subtle, but the overall clustering of panels does not look convincing.

Individual cladding panels on paper spacer...

So...cladding removed...blank canvas again...and time for a rethink. This morning I had a look at (one of many) of Chris Nevard's inspirational layouts, namely Cement Quay to see how the cladding has been handled in 4mm. It looks like a lot of the structures have overlaps to the cladding but not necessarily individual sheets but the painting and weathering and colouring all comes together to make a unified whole...and very pleasing it is, to look at.

Perhaps the individual panels are not the way forward for my building and I will have to either score them or rely on the painting and weathering. This last shot (copyright Mark 46444) does demonstrate how the horizontal banding is very prominent, whilst the lapping is only noticeable by the small fixings to the panels.

Sorry that it's not such a great post, but as I treat my blog as a diary, I think it's important to show that not everything goes quite as planned - Back to the drawing board CAD machine for me