Rufford Red Lion Square

[Regularity]

All part of getting closer to the prototype...

I guess that went over most people’s heads, but there’s mortar bricks than just headers and stretchers...

[Compound2632]

Groan, and groan again. Feeling very dim-witted for not seeing that first time round.

[Regularity]

Groan, and groan again. Feeling very dim-witted for not seeing that first time round.

It would seem that you are not alone in not seeing it.

[Andy Hayter]

Perhaps some of us were just too polite.

[Regularity]

What, polite to me?

[James Harrison]

After a fairly productive weekend on the Cakebox Challenge, I've sketched out my ideas for a interior for the goods offices.  These were done by tracing around the outline of the building, offsetting a line 4mm inside (to allow for wall thickness), marking on door/ window openings and placing the chimney breasts, then lightly sketching in the internal walls. 

 

 

So on the ground floor I've shown a couple of clerk's offices, a telegraph room, the public enquiries office and a mess room for the general goods yard personnel. 

 

 

And then on the first floor you've got the Goods Agent's office and another general clerk's office, a W/C and then just general attic space for... well there wouldn't be the height to get another office in there really so I suppose it would be an archive or species room.  Actually, a species room would probably make more sense as it's just about as far from an entrance to the building as you can get and is next door to the senior staff's offices. 

[James Harrison]

I've been having a manic few weeks on the cakebox challenge entry.  Well, it's almost finished now and I'm really rather pleased with it. 

 

 

Now then, about getting approval for the 20 square feet RLS will need at the outset on the back of this....

[James Harrison]

Right, the CBC is about finished, so shifting target back to the goods offices before half of the bits go on walkabout.  First order of business, drawing up some proper scale internal plans essentially to make sure the staircase works; it's half in the two-storey range and half in the single-storey and I'm planning it such that it goes up half way then doubles back on itself into the two-storey.  This assumes of course that by doing so you don't clobber your head on the roof trusses. 

 

Now, the stories I could tell you about SNAFUs like that I saw perpetuated my coursemates back when I was an undergrad architect....

[James Harrison]

Right, so new project.  Actually, perhaps more accurately described as continuation of a project. That goods office building...

I quite like to get things as complete as possible, particularly buildings.  If you want to build a realistic model building, you have to start off (to my mind) with considering what the function of the building is and its internal arrangements.  All else is, really, folly.

Now, the station building I bought for the conversion is an attractive little structure I'll grant you, if you can overlook the fact that the brickwork is, strictly speaking, completely wrong for the majority of the 19th Century.  But what really is unforgiveable is how it's just an empty shell.  Moreover, if you try to design an interior for it, you quite quickly start to run into little posers.  

Well, I have designed an interior so let me just give you a run-down of the issues.  

1. The larger range has a large chimney but I can't see how that chimney stack would ever serve enough rooms to justify its size.  The entrance doorway runs right across the back of it, so it could only serve two or possibly three rooms on the ground floor.  Coming upstairs, again it could only serve about three rooms making a total of six rooms.... six flues don't need a chimney stack of that bulk.  

2. There doesn't seem to have been any thought about how to get a staircase in.  You can't put one on an external wall because no matter what you try you will end up blocking at least one window, which is obviously a joke, and if you put a staircase in about the only place one will fit it has to be a fairly narrow switchback type.  Putting the staircase in that location, incidentally, presupposes a ratio of useable living or office space to circulation space that would be quite unacceptably high on account of wastage of space.  It's not an elegant or efficient use of available floor area, it gives rise to awkward corners, it's just.... urgh!  Horrible.  

3. Coming upstairs the roof is too low and impinges into the available floor space.  You will have rooms the ceiling height of which quickly diminishes to the point of bumping your head.  Technically it's a storey and a half in height, which admittedly looks attractive, but then to maximum useable floor area there should really be some roof dormers... I'm reminded of the time I was doing my postgrad and we had an assignment to find an old building and do a full set of measured drawings.  I chose a University lodge house, gorgeous thing dating from the 1880s, all ashlar faced stone and looking like a miniature version of the Addams Family house.  That was a storey and half in height too, and the upper floor was.... well when I did the archival research element of that assignment I found the University Estates Department referred to the tenant saying it was like living in a bell tent, with the unwelcome addition that to catch the ceiling was to give yourself concussion. 

Now, where do we go from here?  As I say, I have drawn up a sketch floorplan that I think makes the best of the situation but I'm fully expecting to run into more difficulties and posers as I go along.  

The first thing that has been done has been to build the switchback staircase, which I think will be about the most difficult part of it.  No point building everything else if the most important bit proves beyond you.... anyway I managed that easily enough out of some card and now I am looking at building up the back of the external walls to the full 225mm wall thickness you'd expect from a one-brick-thick wall.  There are seven external walls to do and I've built a backing for one of them.  I think this will be something of a protracted job, especially as of course everything still has to fit together!- there's a lot of test fitting and cutting back and filing involved.

[James Harrison]

I received a parcel earlier today; 10 4mm scale Edwardian workmen from AC Stadden.  I've just got to paint them....

At the moment though they're going to stay in their packaging, as I'm working on phase 2 of the goods yard offices.  Phase 1 you may recall was to paint the brickwork as an experiment.  Phase 2 was intended to be to build an interior, however as I began that it became increasingly apparent that there are other works required that are perhaps easier to do now than later, so Phase 2 has morphed more into modelling the internal face of the external walls and adding window and door cills and lintels.  



Now, the first thing I had done for Phase 2 was to commence the staircase.  I'm not going to repeat my rant of a few days ago but suffice to say that whoever designed this kit.... they didn't view it as a building... So it has to be a switchback staircase and that is what I have built.  Obviously this is the just the bare basics of the staircase and there will be more to it, when I get back to looking at it.  

The intention was to build the staircase, then build the ground floor it was to sit upon, then build the internal walls up to the underside of the first floor.  The difficulty is that I'm going to bulk up the external walls to scale thickness.  This will allow me to properly model the door and window reveals, and whilst you might think therefore that it would be a simple case of measuring around the footprint of the model and taking off a few millimetres from each elevation, having tried that approach in the past I can tell you right now it won't work!  There will always be something you forget to take account of, preventing the interior just neatly slotting inside.  

So I decided to build the interior in-situ, or at least building the ground floor in-situ and the remainder of the interior to be smaller separate elements to be fitted in later.  This meant I had to erect at least a few of the external walls and what with this building being something of a awkward shape it strikes me that perhaps the best thing to do would be to keep it as two separate ranges for as long as possible.  

Before I could erect the external walls I had to fit the internal face of those walls.  So much easier to mark out and cut out the window openings on the internal face when the wall is flat!  Fitting the internal faces was very much an exercise in trial and error; draw it up, cut it out, offer it up to the model and cut off a little more where it won't fit.  With three walls done I was able to glue those walls and the base of the model together.



To get it all to fit meant some pretty big gaps in the corners, which don't really matter as they're invisible from outside the model.  But I have an idea to get rid of them; an internal paper wrapper around the walls.  

Now you might think at this point I'd cut back to the interior, but in fact there are extra details I want to add.  The window lintels.... I don't know what the kit designer was thinking when they were drawn up but they don't look convincing at all.  So I want to work on those.  And the window cills, which are non-existent.  To work on both of these elements requires a degree of access to the inside.  I cut the window cills from matchsticks, but had I just left it at that it would still not look right as of course a window cill is a monolithic block going across the wall thickness.  So I had to give them a paper wrapper, which means fixing it outside, wrapping it around the cill, and then pulling it tight inside the building; impossible to do with the interior in the way.  

Anyhow, this picture perhaps better illustrates what I'm trying to describe.  



It's starting to come around, but there is a lot of work still to do and with the intricate nature of it it takes quite some time.  Plus have you any idea how boring it is trying to fit 11 window cills?  And there are another four walls to look at yet....

So I started this thinking I'd be working from the inside out and instead find myself working from the outside in.

[James Harrison]

Well, just sitting around thinking about how awful and frustrating a job it is to make window cills doesn't get the job done any quicker so I decided to grit my teeth and get on with it.  

So I managed to get all but four of the window cill overlays fitted.  You can't do them all in one go because with now having two ranges built up (three walls in each), you do the first and second walls and then come to do the third and find you need to support the model by gripping the first wall and then you tear out half of the newly-applied cills and have to start the job over again.  So you do two walls... and leave it and go to do something else.... and come back and do the last wall the following day when it has all dried out.  

Anyway, we seem to be getting somewhere with it.  



So here we have the first block (two storey range, two gable walls and a long wall) butted up to the second range (single storey, two long walls and a gable) with the odd final wall between the two just slipped into place.  I've had to cut the fixing lugs off of this wall because some idiot (that would be, err, me) forgot that the long walls sit inside the gables.  

As I say, just the last four cills left to do now so I can think about moving on to the lintels.  

The lintels are a little easier, the first thing you do is take a slip of paper and some graphite and produce a rubbing of the existing lintel.  



Then you cut this out and saturate it with dilute PVA glue to make it more pliable, and then you lay it over the building.  Now comes the difficult bit!- if you leave the middle of the paper slip in place you can fold it back into the window opening to suggest the lintel actually goes through the full wall thickness.  But if you bend it back it tries to distort the lintel face.  This is when having soaked it in PVA becomes useful.  You can take the back of a pair tweezers to hold the lintel flat to the wall whilst coercing a curved fold into it with a paintbrush full of dilute PVA.  Result?



Well, I think it looks ok, let's just do another couple to be able to make an informed judgement on it.



Yes... once painted up like stone I think this will be quite acceptable.

[James Harrison]

Well we finished making the cills and lintels and painted them up.  





Hmm, yes.  Perhaps not quite the colour I had in mind.  Oh, it's cream certainly, but I was intending for something more toward the pale grey end of the spectrum. I'll see how it dries out and give it a wash of weathering and then make a judgement on it.  

Anyway, next step will be to paint the internal faces of the walls and then look at reinstating the glazing.

[James Harrison]

I eventually decided that the window cills and lintels were far too light so I worked over them again with a darker cream (Humbrol #88, over the existing Humbrol #103).  Then it was time to paint the internal wall faces; Humbrol #90 throughout.  Once the interior has been built, I don't think it will be possible anywhere to actually see the internal faces of the external walls, but I didn't want to take the chance as you can gaurantee that the one mucky piece of white plastic in the whole model will also be the only piece of plain plastic on display....

 

So then that done, attention turned to the floor and I have spent this evening building up the ground floor level with the door openings.  Once I had done that I spent a little time finishing off the window and door reveals by painting the remaining vertical bricks a bright wine colour suggestive of terracotta.  So the window and door openings now complete, means that the next stage will be to build the window and door frames, panels and glazing. 

[Edwardian]

I have one of these, but was disappointed by the needless and hard to fix issues you have identified.  As I am on a card-built project, I laid it aside for future consideration, however, I am glad to see that in your hands a silk purse is emerging. 

[James Harrison]

Thank you!  Praise indeed.  It's umm, well it's getting there.  (I did look for a picture of the British Rail slogan to put here, but I mean it's far too modern so it wouldn't make sense.  Plus it would probably put the kiss of death on the project). 

I've started work on the interior of the goods offices.  Firstly the ground floor was fitted.  This is a sheet of 0.5mm plastic sheet which I've strategically braced to (in theory) prevent it from warping or collapsing into what is now the basement.   



That done, I temporarily glued the two roofs together which allowed me to mark up where the two join- and cut again some of the excess (which will allow me to build the upstairs corridor).  

At this point I discovered that despite measuring thrice before building it, the staircase was too high.  So the top four steps were removed.  



Attention then turned to the windows.  This I think is a part of the build I'm not looking forward to.  Building window frames is a job that I can instinctively tell is going to be frustrating, repetitive and taxing.  Lots of tiny little bits of plastic which have to be fettled to fit exactly into the window openings.  Well, so far I have marked up the glass and painted a lot of 0.5mm plastic strip ready to build the frames.... 

[richard i]

Just score the glass and run white paint into the score lines. Wipe off excess. No need for long builds or glue going astray.

Richard

[Edwardian]

I just use the paper self adhesive label method.  Mind you, that is often so that I don't even have to draw a window; I just use a photograph. I'm lazy that way.

 

Pretty impressed with the York Model Making stuff: https://www.yorkmodelrail.com/00-scale/windows-templates-and-headers-1.  I think that, if I were flush, I'd invest in these.

[James Harrison]

Just score the glass and run white paint into the score lines. Wipe off excess. No need for long builds or glue going astray.

Richard

 

That's my plan for the glazing bars splitting the window opening up into the individual panes.  It's the thicker timber framing that's going to be the 'fun' part.  We shall see!

 

I just use the paper self adhesive label method.  Mind you, that is often so that I don't even have to draw a window; I just use a photograph. I'm lazy that way.

 

Pretty impressed with the York Model Making stuff: https://www.yorkmodelrail.com/00-scale/windows-templates-and-headers-1.  I think that, if I were flush, I'd invest in these.

 

Thay'd be ideal, if they'd have fitted.  I'm sure there is a law of nature that you can get something that is exactly what you want or need, except for one crucial detail (too large in this case).  Well, the painted up strips of plastic have dried out so I guess I'll be finding out this evening just how much invective can be worked into an hour's worth of model making. 

[Ravenser]

Well we finished making the cills and lintels and painted them up.  

 

 

 

Hmm, yes.  Perhaps not quite the colour I had in mind.  Oh, it's cream certainly, but I was intending for something more toward the pale grey end of the spectrum. I'll see how it dries out and give it a wash of weathering and then make a judgement on it.  

 

Anyway, next step will be to paint the internal faces of the walls and then look at reinstating the glazing.

 

The thickening and rework of cills and lintils has made a startling difference. Very impressive

[James Harrison]

The thickening and rework of cills and lintils has made a startling difference. Very impressive

 

Thank you.  I'm not sure if it has quite come out in the latest photos but painting the door and window reveals to suggest terracotta has really brought it up too and enhanced the appearance.  It's a small change but well worth doing.  It's not a bad kit overall, per-se, it's just.... there are a lot of things that I'm looking at that could be done better, or details that haven't really been considered.  Let me put it this way.  Once I've finished with it I think I'll be very happy to give it room on RLS, but if I bought it, built it, plonked it down.... I think it would be all too obvious as (and I don't say this disparagingly) a second or third rate model. 

 

Would I buy more kits from the magazine?  I do rather like the look of the worker's cottages, the two-up two-down terrace houses, but the photographs I've seen of them... again the brickwork is wrong and although I've accepted it in this instance, next time... no.

 

I'm sure people are anxious to hear how I got on last night with the windows.  The blood, the gore, the screams, the flames... they will live long in my nightmares.  I, I really don't want to talk about it any more, if that's quite all right with you.  How we'll keep it out of the newspapers I do not know because it was utterly horrific.

 

So Plan A, it didn't work.  Oh my, how it didn't work.  So today I'll be trying Plan B, which with the benefit of hindsight (the poor woman, that's all she has now, losing both eyes to a flying errant piece of plastic).... sorry yes I'll try to stop with the pathos.... where was I....

 

Yes.  Plan B.  Which with hindsight shoul have been Plan A all along.  Plan B takes advantage of my silhouette cutter and I'll be drawing up and cutting out the frames and glazing bars in one piece of sheet plastic, which should in theory then just slot neatly into the window openings.  It should have been Plan A all along.

[James Harrison]

Right, so.  Let's try those windows again, shall we?

 

Step 1.  Draw the windows up on the Silhouette Studio software, and cut them out.  Actually, as I'm using 20 thou plastic sheet, it won't cut them completely out, but it does a good job of scoring the lines so I can complete the cuts with a scalpel.  Quick too!  Draw up one window then duplicate it.  I need 22 of these windows and I've cut 24, so I have a few spare.  Then I need to do the doors and the circular window to the roof space...

 

 

Each window it going to be comprised of two pieces (plus the glazing to be fitted later).  One piece is the glazing bars; the other is the frame. 

 

 

Those are then glued together. 

 

 

And then it is tested for fit.  Because I've fitted an internal face to the walls, each window opening now is slightly different, which means each window has to be fettled to fit (in addition of course to rough edges of the inner wall face being smoothed back). 

 

 

This fettling adds a few minutes to the job but at the same time of course means that each window has to be built bespoke to its location.  Batch building this isn't. 

 

These first few windows I have built I have then painted prior to fitting but actually I'm finding that the act of fitting them removes some of the paint so they have to be touched-in afterward too.  The next few windows I fit I'm going to fit them first and paint them afterward, as they seem easier to get to than I at first thought.  So; once painted and fitted. 

 

 

I have fitted four windows so far, working around the building in rotation- one window per wall, then move to the next.  This reduces the chances of my knocking a window out whilst fitting another.  All told, each window is taking me around 10 to 15 minutes to cut out, build, fettle and fit, and I generally limit my modelling to 1-hour sessions (otherwise my evenings and weekends rush away without my noticing).  I reckon it will therefore be at least three or four days and more likely closer to a week before all of the main windows are in.  Then there are the doors to look at and that circular window. 

[Shadow]

Tichy Trains in America do some nice round windows at reasonable prices.

 

https://www.tichytraingroup.com/Shop/tabid/91/c/ho_framed-windows/p/8149/Default.aspx

 

Other sizes available on the site. Quick delivery as well.

 

Edit to say : They do some nice windows of all shapes/styles/sizes.

Edited April 29, 2018 by Shadow

[James Harrison]

12 windows in and painted. 5 more windows fitted but unpainted. 5 yawning chasms still to look at, plus the doors plus the circular window. Getting through it...

[James Harrison]

Progress!

 

All 22 main windows built, fettled, fitted, painted.  Tonight, I start the doors...

 

 

[James Harrison]

All 22 main window frames built, fettled, fitted, painted.  Circular window frame fitted.  All doors fitted and painted.

 

 

 

 

Once the glazing is in that will be Phase 2 completed.  I'm about ready for a change.... tomorrow afternoon I'll most likely be starting either some GCR cattle wagons or (more likely) a Barnum saloon.