Chris Williamson

Final details added to the shed roof. Just need the liquid cement to go off and then this too can be primed with a rattle can once the humidity has dropped.

Sneaked a bit more time to work on the shed roof. Turns out there's more to it that just sticking sheets of corrugated iron straight on to it. So, again, this is taking longer than expected. Some foam board on top of the timber frame: The bottom edge of the Wills sheet has been trimmed to leave just two whole 'sheets' of corrugated from eaves to ridge. Careful work needed to get the unevenly laid edges trimmed precisely: I've taken note of the Wills modelling tips on the packaging - chamfering the edge and then carefully scoring the underside with a circular profile needle file to match the corrugations, as well as is possible:

All the quoins are now stuck on the Engine House. One day I'll count up how many pieces of plasticard I've cut out and stuck on this and the chimney. It'll be a big number running into several hundred. That work now needs to harden up before I can shape it any further. Referring back to the photo of the cardboard mock-up of the mine working terraces, in a post towards the beginning of this topic, you may recall an open sided shed covering one of the sidings. I thought I'd tackle that next, prior to coming back to the engine house. Again, the geometry is 'awkward' as it, too, sits at an angle to the back of the layout, with much of the back half of the roof truncated by the surround /backscene. As the timber framework is too heavy to represent with plasticard or strip, I've opted for a wooden construction for the visible elements. A trip to Model World in Ramsey secured the necessary. We only have one model shop left here in the Island now and with the phrase 'If you don't use it, you'll loose it!' in mind it's always good to support our only on-island supplier. Built from 5mm square section, held together with pins and PVA, here's the basic frame under construction: The basic frame completed: Then some detail: And a mock-up cereal-packet roof to double check geometry and fit: I'm a great believer spending time on a mock-up. To my mind there's no substitute for checking the look of an idea and the details of dimensions prior to expending valuable time and and precious materials on the finished article.

After taking a deep breath, repeat the work shown in recent posts all over again. Only this time on the Engine House. Except, not quite! Having thought on the matter, I realised that the technique used on the chimney wouldn't work on the Wills slate walling sheets here. And I thought I might save myself some of the work needed when scribing around the quoins. So this time I'm removing the slate moulding in those places that I want to inlay a quoin. I'd already taken this approach with the lintels and window ledges on this building. It's possible with the very careful use of a very sharp knife, a very, very steady hand, careful planning as to what is to be removed - you can't readily put it back if you take too much off - and a lot of patience... I'd been pleased with the result already achieved using this method and it's visually superior to the 'stuck-on and blended' lintels and window ledges on the other two slate buildings I've previously completed. That's not to say that I'm not pleased with them, just that this looks better when one is compared against the other. So to pictures - First, where I'm starting from. And to note that, with the 'batter' on these walls, I've had to build up a wedge of material in all the openings to bring doors and windows into the perpendicular: You might better see that from the inside: Next, I've put a rebate into the stonework on each face of each corner: From here I can remove the slate stone moulding, in line with the moulded courses and to a size that suits the size of quoin I'm going to create at this point: Finally, a strip of 40 thou plasticard is cut to a suitable width to fit the depth of the space created. This is then shaped slightly using a needle file, cut to an appropriate length and stuck in place: The other face of the quoin is cut from the same strip to ensure consistency. I stick the long face down first an then lay the second, shorter face against this, trimming to the correct length once the solvent has hardened sufficiently. As with the chimney, there's a lot to do and this is going to take some time to complete.

The construction of this seemingly simple structure has taken a ridiculous amount of time. But, though I say it myself, it has turned out rather well and I'm very pleased with it. If I have learnt anything from this exercise, it's that some stages of construction can't be hurried. The stuck on quoins certainly couldn't be worked up into their final shape until the solvent had completely 'gone-off'. They needed to fully harden prior to taking the needle files and knife to them and that took at least a couple of weeks to happen. Hopefully you get some sense of the finished effect, prior to painting, from these photos: To be primed once the solvent used in construction has completely 'gone-off' and the weather is less humid. Now back to the Engine House.

Nearly done! Just need to finish 'creating' the top from four strips of 40 thou card that then has to be blended into the capping walls:

For some years we lived in an old cottage, high up in the Derbyshire Peak District. Actually, two cottages we knocked into one. We only finished the 'conversion' in time to sell up and come back to the Island. One particular job took me the best part of a year to complete. It was never meant to be that way. The intention was to complete the job in a week. The cottage we extended into had pitch-pine floorboards upstairs, laid directly onto joists of the same that then formed the ceiling of the downstairs rooms. Our 'new' living room ceiling was a mess and we naïvely thought that a bit of judicious hand sanding would improve things. It didn't. The result: a ceiling that looked as though it had the measles. Followed: the purchase of a belt sander and a heavy duty detail sander; a year of evenings and weekends, when work allowed, spent covered in dust with back and arms screaming from the pain of working overhead. I don't expect that this chimney is going to be quite such an epic exercise. But, like that ceiling, I'm beginning to wonder why I started such a ridiculously involved task when I might have opted for an easier solution. The quoins have been individually applied. each formed by a strip of plasticard cut in two and stuck together around the angle of the chimney. Sorry, these photos are rather 'one-dimensional' so you can't completely see that construction here: I then test primed a little of this work to get a better idea of how it would look. As a consequence it was far too obvious that the quoins appeared to have been stuck on over the walling sheet. So I've carefully scribed around them all with a sharp knife and pointy needle file: Finally, I've reached the stage of greatly reducing the thickness of the plasticard to lower it 'back into' the walling sheet that it's been applied to and to blend it in around the edges as far as I can: A few more days work might just see this done! There's just that nagging thought that the Engine House is going to have to be treated the same way if the two are going to look as though they go together!!

Who hasn't, at some stage, realised that they should have done one thing before another and not the order in which they had actually done it - by which time it's too late! I suspect we've all done it, at least once?

Taking a break from the Engine House for a while as I do need to finish the big chimney that goes with it. It took an eternity to stick plasticard pieces onto the corners to form the quoins. It is now taking even longer to scribe and file around them to give the appearance that they are part of the original Wills stone sheet. Photos to follow in due course - which is to say in two or three weeks time if current progress is anything to go by! Meanwhile, it was sunny here last Sunday afternoon. We went for a walk. By 'chance' our circuit happened to take in Cross Vein mine aka Snuff the Wind - which is strictly the name of the road that passes by the mine. An opportunity to take some more pictures for research purposes. You can clearly see that, in reality, Manx slate is far more broken and irregular than the Welsh inspired Wills slate sheets or indeed any of their other offerings. As I'm not about to attempt to scribe or engrave such fine detail from scratch, the Wills sheets are very much a compromise.

Woody, Painting the (otherwise) finished article still frightens me. It isn't finished until it's painted and weathered! And I think it's so easy to spoil a good piece of work at that stage. I'm still in awe of those people who clearly are artists when it comes to the finished article, both on this forum and elsewhere. Still, practice makes perfect, though the advice and example of others with far more experience goes a long way.

The massive Pump Rod is nearly finished. But how to represent the castings that carried the bearings for the pump valve rods? Start with a large amount of laminated material and then spend several evenings removing most of if with a sharp knife and needle files of appropriate profile. Will this ever end, I wonder? At this stage I'm going to have to own up to having watched a film that Chris Ford posted on his blog some time ago. I may have been unduly influenced. Google: Zen and the Art of Model Making - The Story of Philip Reed, if you dare!

There's some useful guidance here even if you're not using DCC Components own kit: The Layout: Wires and Wiring (dccconcepts.com)

It's very generous of you to say so. That said, with a little practice and patience, it isn't as hard as it looks. Cereal packet cardboard is a good source of cheap mock-up material on which to practice. A cutting mat, sharp knife and a steel rule are essentials. Drawing or marking everything out beforehand, as accurately as possible, contributes greatly to the end result. After that, take your time and enjoy the process. Oh, and start with something simple. I (re-)started with the Wills water tower kit and promptly discarded everything apart from the tank panels (which I proceeded to cut down in size) and the 'trunk' / hose. That left me with only four walls to make, just one of which needed a door in it.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, Keith. Once you've started making exactly what you want, that perfectly fits the desired location on the layout, and that consistently represents the architecture of the area, kits stop being an option. Particularly where local stone is widely used in construction, buildings in a given geographical area tend, to my eyes, to have a certain look. And there are often architectural features peculiar to the locality, too. Railway specific and brick built town buildings aside, kits are often generic and rarely appear to come from anywhere that you could definitely identify. It helps, too, that I grew up in the age of scratch building. The Railway Modeller of my youth often included drawings of buildings for the scratch builder to reproduce. The N Gauge layout my father built for my brother and I incorporated a plasticard Ramsey station building from such a plan. The other station included a cardboard built Settle and Carlisle station building! My first attempts were created from a limited supply of suitable cardboard, carefully scribed and painted to suit. Rooftiles were strips of light cartridge paper painstakingly snipped with small scissors and overlaid on to the cardboard substrate. Crude brick papers were another option. And pocket money sometimes ran to a printed cardboard kit purchased from Beatties and made by a long since forgotten company that predated Metcalfe by some years. Money and bought options were short. Time passed slowly and there was, it seemed, plenty of it, at least to start with.

When I started this layout, further back in time than I now care to remember, my intention was to use kit buildings as much as possible. I naively thought that this would be a quick and experimental layout that would lead to something more substantive in the future, once I had learnt from the experience. The words Delusional and Fool could, quite rightly, be used in any responses to this comment. So here I am. Getting ever more sucked into scratch building details to satisfy my need to reproduce what I have in my head as accurately as possible. In the latest fit of enthusiasm / stupidity, I'm now wondering how I might get hold of a suitable, small, geared electric motor fitted with a cam that would animate the pump. Thoughts or suggestions, anyone? The build continues with this aim in mind, hence the bushes fitted into the beam centres and between the beams at each 'nose' and for the pump valve rods.

The weather is less than clement outdoors. I have an excuse to stay in from the garden and make a little more progress on the plasticard lamination to represent cast iron beams.

Would it be a little less expensive and possibly easier to make these Pairs coaches using the Dundas kits - albeit that they don't produce a a kit that's a direct equivalent to the Peco Brake? Just a thought.

I've realised I can't complete the shell of the Engine House without first constructing the beam or Bob to use the Cornish terminology. There was a considerable use of Cornish expertise in the Manx mines and, in turn, a good number of Manxmen went to work in the Cornish mines. As only the shell of the engine houses remain here, I've had to draw on Cornish sources to be guided in the design of these massive pumps. Currently reproducing cast iron using a 60 and 40 thou plasticard lamination. As ever starting with a cardboard mock-up. This is going to take a little while to complete!

Work starts on the big Engine House. Lots of Wills slate sheets to be butt jointed to provide cover for the height of these walls.

I've not had the opportunity to take any photos when the light has been good enough, so here's a couple of pictures of progress so far. Taken this morning with improvised lighting: Stonework primed. Another view of the completed winding house shell.

My father took me to see it too. I think it was 1965 or possibly even 1966, though I only have the vaguest recollection of anything about it other than the sheer number of people there. Doubtless he had some difficulty explaining why Close Mooar Crossing and Crosby weren't to be seen. I'd forgotten the show used to be at the Corn Exchange. I have clearer recollections of going to the UMIST Sackville Street building in later years.

All well here thanks Neil. Trust all is well with you. The big railway outdoors is surveyed and the route provisionally approved by the Domestic Authorities here. But I'm stalled awaiting a friendly Gobbag who's promised to help with the significant groundworks. He has the necessary skills as well as the tools (principally a cement mixer) and, having reflected, I though it best to await his assistance rather than my attempting to developing the skills at the expense of the finished job. Slow progress continues to be made on my indoor project as documented elsewhere in Narrow Gauge Modelling.

Are you looking for this by any chance?

The shell of the big building project is now completed and primed. When time and light allow, I'll try and take some pictures that do justice to it. Meanwhile work has started on a couple more structures for the mine: The larger chimney and the winding house that sits with the smaller chimney. I've again used 5mm foamboard to form the core for both. The Wills sheets are butt-jointed in situ on the chimney. The Wills sheets are often not quite tall enough to cover the full height of these buildings. Having struggled to get a good alignment when adding strips of walling in situ, I've concluded that it's best to butt joint these on a hard flat surface first. Having left them to 'cure' for a day or so, the complete wall can be cut out as one piece to the dimensions required. The gable-end is made up of three pieces: a fragment to complete the apex; a full height piece to make up the full width of the gable; another fragment at the base where the building is set into the upper terrace. The full height of the side wall is competed with a strip just below the two lower windows. The 'slot' in the gable is intended to allow the cable from the head gear into the winding house. Details still to be added and then this can be attached and trimmed. I'm coming to the end of my oldest stock of 30 thou card. This from a shopping trip I made into Manchester when my parents lived in South Manchester. In time, as my interests went elsewhere, my remaining modelling bits and pieces passed to my father and I've subsequently rediscovered some of them. Great memories of occasional Saturday trips to Beatties with a good school friend. Roger kept at his modelling on and off over the years and I get the occasional photo of a 4mm fine scale GWR branch terminus that now resides in Perth W.A.

I've finally had the opportunity to make a little more progress. A couple of quick pictures of the building, in-situ, to give you an idea of what's been going on. The ridge tiles on the hip roof proved particularly challenging and at one time I thought they would need to come off and be replaced. I think the end result here is just about credible. The doors and door frames are not yet stuck in at this stage. I'll prime and paint these separately and then fix to the structure of the building once that has been painted. Similarly, the office bay window, the roof of which will be attached once the bay has been fixed in place. Still to do: remaining doors; remaining chimney pots; chimney stack flashing; wooden hoist beam above the first floor door; window frames / glazing - still pondering this one and will be fitted on completion of painting. That might fill my time between now and Christmas!?