The Night Mail

[petethemole]

2 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

Quite a few of the stone built houses also have brick chimneys!

Depending on the type of stone available locally, brick was commonly used for chimneys as it resisted heat better. This would be the entire flue, not just the chimney stack.

[Dave Hunt]

Visiting friends gone so I'm now catching up with TNM. Looking at HH's post about producing his low relief terrace makes me think that were I to be doing it I would favour making the frontage from a single piece of ply or MDF with DAS clay coating and scribed stone/brickwork. Although it would probably be a longer job than scribed foam I think it would have the advantage of strength so the terrace could be placed and removed at will without damage and could therefore easily extend over baseboard joints. Having used this method in the past I haven't found it too lengthy a job and providing the DAS is bonded to the backing with PVA it is extremely resilient.

 

Dave

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, Dave Hunt said:

Visiting friends gone so I'm now catching up with TNM. Looking at HH's post about producing his low relief terrace makes me think that were I to be doing it I would favour making the frontage from a single piece of ply or MDF with DAS clay coating and scribed stone/brickwork. Although it would probably be a longer job than scribed foam I think it would have the advantage of strength so the terrace could be placed and removed at will without damage and could therefore easily extend over baseboard joints. Having used this method in the past I haven't found it too lengthy a job and providing the DAS is bonded to the backing with PVA it is extremely resilient.

 

Dave

I have considered using the carcass/PVA/DAS approach, having used it before.  Certainly, if you make a mistake in the carving department, you can refill the mistake with more DAS and then rework the area when it is dry.  I've also used DAS very successfully to repair concrete garden ornaments!

 

However, having built the retaining walls and bridge abutments on Pantmawr North in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to carve it all out, I'm opting for the foam.

 

Having looked at the work involved, especially with the roof and the thousands of slates the terrace will need, I'm thinking of breaking up the monotony by having a stepped arrangement with the roof as the road climbs up the side of the valley.

 

The examples shown are bigger better houses with from gardens and have obviously been refurbished.

 

With the smaller single fronted houses, I'd get two houses per step up/down. 

 

Bethania Chapel will be a stand alone project along these lines, although a second storey might add to it's magnificence.

 

 

The windows will need backdating🤣

Edited May 16 by Happy Hippo

[AndyID]

16 minutes ago, Happy Hippo said:

 

However, having built the retaining walls and bridge abutments on Pantmawr North in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to carve it all out, I'm opting for the foam.

 

 

Do you melt the foam with a hot iron?

[Dave Hunt]

I like the stepped arrangement HH - adds interest as well as giving natural break points. I don't know whether you've used self-adhesive tile strips before but I have used them on all the buildings on the shed layout and they are very quick and easy. Richard Ellis of Monksgate Models make them* and I've found them very good and quite cheap.

 

Dave

 

* I have no involvement with MGM except as a very satisfied customer.

[New Haven Neil]

22 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

At least I sent you two height setting gauges, one for the Dinghams and one for the Flippems.

 

However rolling stock manufacturers, even in 7 mm scale, has a nasty habit of small, but irritating height fluctuations,which can cause all sort of upsets when you find you have to open up a coupling slot upwards at one end of a wagon, and then downwards at the other.

 

Indeed!  Getting there slowly, in batches.  Some locos are not the easiest to do, and prove your observations about odd hook heights.  However the ones done so far work better than me struggling with 3-links, with unsteady hands and dodgy close range eyesight!  The swear-per-couplingup ratio is much improved.

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, AndyID said:

 

Do you melt the foam with a hot iron?

Almost, I have a hot wire cutter which is a lot tidier than a saw and rasp.

[SM42]

Why is modern paint so useless?

 

Quick drying they said 

 

2 years later the woodwork is still slightly sticky. 

Lean on it for a few seconds and you can feel a hint of resistance as you let go. 

 

Put a plant pot, or anything on a window cill for a few weeks and when you pick it up, the paint follows. 

 

There is a nice line the colour of the chair where it has moved over time and was hard up against the woodwork. 

 

Perhaps it's all a conspiracy to get us to buy more paint.

 

Andy

[monkeysarefun]

When it comes to workers terraces, I've always loved those built throughout Melbourne in the later part of the 1800's during the height of the goldrush which at one point made Melbourne the richest city in the world, and second largest in the British Empire.

This sparked a massive building boom and the wealth was reflected in the decoration applied to even small workers terraces. Most inner city suburbs still retain many of them, despite later redevelopments and there's always something interesting to see when walking around there. Termed Italianate or "wedding cake" style, main features were the ornately decorated parapets, poly-chrome brickwork and wrought-iron "lace" around the verandahs.

 

(By the 1890's over-speculation was followed by a panic and a run on the banks and the depression of 1893 wreaked havoc on the colony of Victoria, but it was crazy while it lasted).

 

I've always had a hankering to model them but its only the last couple of years since I've been getting into 3D modelling and resin printing that I'd be confident of doing the detailing justice..

 

 

Edited May 17 by monkeysarefun

[J. S. Bach]

2 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

Indeed!  Getting there slowly, in batches.  Some locos are not the easiest to do, and prove your observations about odd hook heights.  However the ones done so far work better than me struggling with 3-links, with unsteady hands and dodgy close range eyesight!  The swear-per-couplingup ratio is much improved.

I found that KD makes a knuckle coupler that replaces the NEM(?) found on Branchline 00 equipment; they mate right up to the KDs on my US H0 trains. So my Athearn SP SD45 can haul a cut of BR MK1s with no problem!

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.

[skipepsi]

3 hours ago, Happy Hippo said:

I have considered using the carcass/PVA/DAS approach, having used it before.  Certainly, if you make a mistake in the carving department, you can refill the mistake with more DAS and then rework the area when it is dry.  I've also used DAS very successfully to repair concrete garden ornaments!

 

However, having built the retaining walls and bridge abutments on Pantmawr North in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to carve it all out, I'm opting for the foam.

 

Having looked at the work involved, especially with the roof and the thousands of slates the terrace will need, I'm thinking of breaking up the monotony by having a stepped arrangement with the roof as the road climbs up the side of the valley.

 

The examples shown are bigger better houses with from gardens and have obviously been refurbished.

 

With the smaller single fronted houses, I'd get two houses per step up/down. 

 

Bethania Chapel will be a stand alone project along these lines, although a second storey might add to it's magnificence.

 

 

The windows will need backdating🤣

The miner's cottage/terrace that I was born in was stepped as shown but was much more basic two up two down only a rear door and cheap bricks made at the nearby colliery. Crigglestone West rather than Crigglestone East which DH may know. Or vice versa memory fades.

[BR60103]

Over here, there was a practice of using a posher, more expensive brick for the front of a building and cheaper, probably local, brick on the sides. I know one building where the frontage brick goes a dozen feet down the side before it changes.  There used to be another building beside it and a dark laneway.

 Near it is an interesting situation.  A store was build in the opening between two other buildings by hanging it from the existing walls. One of the buildings was a bank. In the 1950s there was a great movement to replace solid bank buildings with the bus shelter style. When they came to this one, they couldn't tear down the rear wall because the store was using it!  I don't know what all the legal arrangements were, but the store building was still there last I looked. 

[TheQ]

The HOe French muddle railway I'm slowly building, uses ply or hard mdf in the construction of many of the buildings. Ply is particularly used at the end and back where the buildings are hiding the return track. The ply is incorporated into the structure of the portable layout, forming box sections to stop the back and end scenes wobbling. The entire layout is made from 1/4 inch ply with the only solid wood being backing pieces for the leg hinges and the legs themselves.

 

Even in the little village next to mine, there are inserted houses built between two previously detached houses, probably done well over a hundred years ago... Posh frontage brickwork was quite common round here, though the problem with ours is they used soft Norfolk reds to form a pattern between early hard bricks with a slightly salted coating. The soft reds spall badly exposed to the weather off the north sea.

[iL Dottore]

I don’t know how “old fashioned” HH’s approach is to modelling, but resin casting is definitely the way to go if you need to make a lot of copies of the same thing (as in a row of terraced houses) and you don’t want to go down the 3D printer route.

 

I made the fronts and roofs of the row of Georgian Terraced Houses (GTR) I built for my (now abandoned) country town layout project using resin (photos of which are somewhere on RMWeb - one from my files is beloe). The most time consuming part of this process is making the master (from which the silicon rubber moulds are made) and with two or three moulds you can produce a row of of resin cast fronts in about an hour or so. But as silicon rubber moulds will allow you to reproduce even the finest details, it’s really worth taking your time to create a high quality master.

 

A few “lessons learned” from that project:

1. Whilst you can reproduce some incredibly fine detail with this method, you do have to have a reasonable thickness otherwise your building fronts can (and will) distort when assembling the terrace. The fronts of the GTR were moulded to prototypical thickness, which wasn’t a good idea.
2. If creating a master for something like a row of houses, do something I didn’t: make sure you can interlock the pieces together using something like a comb joint or a mortise and tenon joint - it’s far sturdier than a plain edge to plain edge (which is what I did) And with minor modifications to the master you can then make the moulds for the handed end of row frontages.
3. Normally you need to make up a minimum amount of both the silicon rubber and (then) the resin and the minimum amount is often more than what is needed to make the mould/make the casting. Therefore to prevent waste, it’s best to have a number of masters (or things you want to duplicate) when making the moulds and then when casting.
4. Air bubbles are the curse of creating both moulds and castings - though modern silicon rubbers and casting resins are supposed to be more resistant to trapping air bubbles (my venture into casting was quite a few years back). “Slow and Low” pouring helps reduce bubbles (serious resin casters use vibration tables and vacuum chambers to remove air bubbles from their work).

This may all sound a little convoluted, but it beats doing it all by hand (leaving more time for other jobs - like eating cake!). 
 

In all it turned out pretty OK, despite my fumbling!

Edited May 17 by iL Dottore
Added photo

[polybear]

6 hours ago, SM42 said:

Why is modern paint so useless?

 

Quick drying they said 

 

2 years later the woodwork is still slightly sticky. 

Lean on it for a few seconds and you can feel a hint of resistance as you let go. 

 

Put a plant pot, or anything on a window cill for a few weeks and when you pick it up, the paint follows. 

 

There is a nice line the colour of the chair where it has moved over time and was hard up against the woodwork. 

 

Perhaps it's all a conspiracy to get us to buy more paint.

 

Andy

It’s all Europe’s fault for insisting paint had to be much more “friendly”.

[bbishop]

8 minutes ago, polybear said:

It’s all Europe’s fault for insisting paint had to be much more “friendly”.

Ah yes, as usual a statement of "fact" without the supporting evidence.  

[iL Dottore]

3 hours ago, BR60103 said:

Over here, there was a practice of using a posher, more expensive brick for the front of a building and cheaper, probably local, brick on the sides.

As I found out when doing research for the Georgian Terrace Houses I built, this was relatively common in London during Georgian times and beyond). Building would be built using the cheapest possible bricks for the majority of the construction, then when finishing the facade then either a skin of very high quality bricks or stone (sometimes a stone substitute like stucco or one of the fake stone mixtures).

 

Interestingly, I learnt that much of the Georgian housing still existant in London is “speculator’s rubbish” - never designed to be last as long as it has. I also learnt that a lot of the Georgian housing stock in London was built because of prostitution: smart, clever, attractive and (initially) penniless young women - with both luck and skill - could become successful and highly remunerated Courtesans and the really canny amongst them would invest in one of the few things women could invest in at that time: buildings!

[iL Dottore]

17 minutes ago, polybear said:

It’s all Europe’s fault for insisting paint had to be much more “friendly”.

 

7 minutes ago, bbishop said:

Ah yes, as usual a statement of "fact" without the supporting evidence.  

Given how things have developed in the UK since the referendum, the origins of such problems are more probably Whitehall than Brussels.

[iL Dottore]

I found the relevant RMWeb page (AND the photos are still there!) 

 

[jamie92208]

8 minutes ago, iL Dottore said:

As I found out when doing research for the Georgian Terrace Houses I built, this was relatively common in London during Georgian times and beyond). Building would be built using the cheapest possible bricks for the majority of the construction, then when finishing the facade then either a skin of very high quality bricks or stone (sometimes a stone substitute like stucco or one of the fake stone mixtures).

 

Interestingly, I learnt that much of the Georgian housing still existant in London is “speculator’s rubbish” - never designed to be last as long as it has. I also learnt that a lot of the Georgian housing stock in London was built because of prostitution: smart, clever, attractive and (initially) penniless young women - with both luck and skill - could become successful and highly remunerated Courtesans and the really canny amongst them would invest in one of the few things women could invest in at that time: buildings!

My stationmasters house, which was Georgian, on LGA was like that, nice stone on the road frontage  then brick on the other three sides.  Also the rainwater goods were hidden behind walls at the edge of the roof.  I used 3mm ply as the carcase then Das for the brickwork and corner qoins with scribed plasticard for the smooth dressed stone.  For the long terrace on the back scene, John Patrick cheated,  he painted three frontage then photocopied the painting and stuck them together.  It looks good. 

 

Jamie

[jamie92208]

Just one point about terraces.  Certainly terraces in Yorkshire often had a somewhat larger  dwelling at one end where someone like a fireman or pit deputy would live. 

 

Jamie

[SM42]

1 hour ago, polybear said:

It’s all Europe’s fault for insisting paint had to be much more “friendly”.

 

Maybe, maybe not.

 

I'm more inclined towards the quick dry = convenient  marketing angle. 

 

Add to that the house doesn't stink for 3 days. 

 

Both are good for marketing to the short of time modern DIYer. 

 

The mandated removal of some of the world's less friendly chemicals may have been a driver of change but I suspect that the marketing of quick* and less smelly was more of an incentive. 

 

Andy

 

* they don't mention you need more coats due to poor coverage though 

Edited May 17 by SM42

[SM42]

1 hour ago, iL Dottore said:

 

Given how things have developed in the UK since the referendum, the origins of such problems are more probably Whitehall than Brussels.

 

It's still everybody else's fault regardless. 

 

SOP  in politics worldwide

 

Andy

[Winslow Boy]

5 minutes ago, SM42 said:

 

It's still everybody else's fault regardless. 

 

SOP  in politics worldwide

 

Andy

Plus we are going to do it and there's s&d all you can do about it.

 

Something that seems to be all to common these days and not just in the commercial world either.