Scalescenes low relief factory/warehouse T026, amended. In 4mm scale

[Dr.Glum]

I need to fill the background above my small station with buildings. The topic describing progress with the station and other scenic components is

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/175932-small-station-on-a-corner-baseboard-from-scalescenes-r004a_tx45-and-texture-sheets-with-stone-tx46-industrial-buildings-close-around

 

I build using 2mm greyboard painted with knotting fluid. In the first view I have marked out the top layer and am marking the window layer with the Scalescenes print as a temporary overlay.

Cutting arcs for curved window lintels makes me nervous – it’s too easy to cut too far into the curve. These curves are too small for the Olfa cutter that I used in the past for the railway arches. A knife blade has straight length, but you’re trying cut a curve; a series of zero length straights.

The method I’m using here is to use the extreme point of the knife blade to make a series of very short marks around the curves and ordinary marks in the corners of the windows. Then remove the paper overlay. I cut out a rectangle and then a series of small radial cuts, not trying to cut full depth. Here you exploit a weakness of greyboard, in that when you cut close to an edge there is a danger of layers spalling off. Here I use that to gradually repeat the cuts and push off the loose card until its all gone.

(The print overlay is just put there for the photo, not stuck down yet.)

Fettling the holes. After cutting there is always a small ridge in the card at the cut edges, pushed up by the knife blade which has a measurable thickness. I run the edge of a six inch metal ruler along the edges to flatten this. (I usually apply the round end of the ruler, at a very shallow angle.)

I have a 15mm wide file with a flat side and a shallow curved side. I use this to tidy up the curves and the straight sides of the aperture, always working from the outside and frequently checking the result. Somehow whenever I cut a box shape, the corners come out a bit rounded and this has to be corrected.

Once I’m satisfied (or rather, can’t stand fiddling about any longer) the corners need painting brown and freight grey under the blue brick arches.

The next image shows the overlay going onto the outside card layer. I find it very very difficult to glue down an A4 sheet with 12 apertures in it, and expect to get everything level and in the right place (sideways and vertically). There are inevitable minute inaccuracies in the trimming of the overlay holes and ditto in the cut apertures. After I’d got my first attempt down I could see that the sheet needed to be slightly off centre and a tadge not level so that the spacing errors would be averaged out for the best look of the thing.

So it had to come off – it didn’t want to and a tore a small section, but as I couldn’t face cutting out another print I reapplied the Pritstick to the card and tried again.

You won’t know if I managed a decent job till the two layers are finished and glued together. In the view below I am gluing on the pieces to complete the narrow recesses which will be blank wall, not a small window. I have separated them and trimmed them so that I can align each one and make the best possible end-on join to the rest of the brickwork.

Next job is gluing down the flaps that form the sides of the reveals. I use PVA applied with a flat cocktail stick. Once dried the excess must be cut off flush so that the card layer will glue down properly to the next layer. It is tricky to apply a knife flat enough – the handle gets in the way. Initially I took the blade out of my scapel, but it was hard to manipulate. I found it much easier to use a discarded Stanley knife blade, using the still-sharp centre of the blade (that never gets used in the knife), held in both hands at a very very shallow angle. Push the cut onto the card by sawing in that direction only (to the right in the photo), not away into the aperture. I had to let go with one hand in order to take the photo.

I found it speeded the process up and only in a couple of spots did I need to apply a file. More next time.

[JamFjord]

Always interesting to see someone else's process - some nice tips here for me to try out on my next build. Cheers

[Dr.Glum]

I couldn’t decide if I liked the blue brick in the pages that include the buttresses. When you see a brick warehouse on a layout, chances are if it’s got red and blue brick, it’ll scream “Scalescenes!”, or at least it does to me. Nothing wrong with that, but my mental image of warehouses and mill buildings is bolstered by what you find in southern Lancashire. Lots of red brick, not so much blue. (I did see some beautiful images of blue and red in a thread in RMweb of prototype images, showing the railway warehouse next to Huddersfield Station.)

So I cut some buttresses and laid them on with covers of (on the right) T027 dark blue brick printed without adjustment, TX06 Aged red brick (middle) printed dark and +20% (in printer properties, manual set of color/intensity) and ditto (left) printed dark only.

I decided the blue did look good, but I wanted ‘my’ look, so I chose the left hand one, as best matching the inner layer which had been laser printed years ago.

[MyRule1]

Nice to read others tips for tackling Scalescenes kits. I must admit cutting arcs such as the top of windows such as those on the warehouse was one of my main motivations for investing in a Cricut cutter.

[ISW]

On 24/03/2023 at 21:48, Dr.Glum said:

Cutting arcs for curved window lintels makes me nervous – it’s too easy to cut too far into the curve. These curves are too small for the Olfa cutter that I used in the past for the railway arches. A knife blade has straight length, but you’re trying cut a curve; a series of zero length straights.

If you watch the "Chandwell" YouTube channel, where he makes very detailed N-gauge buildings out of cardboard, his method is to keep the knife straight, and move the paper/cardboard around under it after each small cut. You can see this in action in his YouTube "Too many mistakes? The cornice wasn't quite right - what did I do?" just after the 1-minute mark (I didn't want to link/embed his video, as it's not mine to link!).

 

Ian

[Dr.Glum]

There are cut edges that now catch my eye because there’s hint of white paper edge. I was lucky to pick up a metal box of 18 pencils in a range of greens and greys in a bargain shop (B&M) for about the same cost as a single Faber-Castell pencil from Hobbycraft. So I’ve treated any blemishes with tan, grey or black. The colour doesn’t bleed into the printing the way a felt tip might. I used them dry.

What I should have done is sprayed the whole thing with protective varnish (Daler-Rowney Perfix Colourless Fixative) at this stage, but I was anxious about glueing the windows on, and forgot. Oh well.

I use PVA because I need to be able to move the transparency around to get the best position in the aperture. I apply the absolute minimum (and not too near the edges) to avoid it squeezing out at the reveals. In the photo I have dobbed some of it on, but I will smear it out with a small screwdriver before applying the window.

I have a sheet of white paper under the building so that when I do the tricky act of dropping the window onto the glue (the bit that worries me most), I have at least a rough chance of getting it into position. I give the glue areas a very light press down, then pick up the wall and adjust the position so that the visible edges line up and the window looks ‘natural’ in its aperture. I can’t cut window openings with micron accuracy, so it’s always a case of “does it look right?” Turn it back over and press down firmly. Turn-over and check again.

The last picture is with the warehouse sat in place. Real bricks and model ones!

I need to build a shallow box behind to block off the through view and to hold the lights. I’m keen to extend the walling to the right, but I havn’t planned yet what will be brick and what will be stone. I’m going to leave that for another day as I’m keen to finish the footbridge that will cross to the right hand half of that picture.

[Dr.Glum]

When I created the walling at the back of the platform, I didn’t think too much about creating right angles. This is now making life difficult because I want to add higher brickwork on the same line. But twice woe! I have now found that the real brickwork sticks out further than the brick down at the walling level. I contemplated taking a grinding tool to the brickwork, but in the end formed a new layer of stone walling 2mm thick to cover the central panel in the photo below. (New panel not in place yet.)

I hate that visible edge that shows on the buttress to the right – oh well, I’ll apply the 3 feet rule.

Adding the next brick panel at an angle to match was a bit of a game, and having made a guestimate of the offset at the RH end, I used blocks of wood and offcuts of card to lay the panel on for gluing. (PVA is wonderfully strong stuff, but when the edge joint had dried I made shaped card gussets to support the joint.)

I decided the brickwork looked a bit plain and I didn’t have clearance behind for any windows, so I thought of the quoins that I remembered in the Scalescenes Large Station R005. They would have done, but while searching through sheets of prints I found instead the set of 4 pages that comprise TX46 Random Ashlar and there were smaller darker quoins. When I first bought texture sheets (2007?) you just got one plain image of the relevant stone or brickwork. Now you additionally get all sorts of matching arches and lintels and so on and templates for their use.

Quite tedious to cut out in a uniform manner – not a late evening job. Then the edges need treating. Although I’ve previously mentioned coloured pencils, I decided the paper fret is too bendy to rub colour off a pencil. So back to the brown acrylic. I used the brush that you see dipped (slightly) into the end of the paint tube, wiped off on the newspaper and then lightly brushed at the back of the paper edge from behind. When I misjudged the wiping of a newly charged brush and had too much wetness I caused a couple of blemishes on the front but, as my old man used to say, “I blind man ‘ud be glad to see it!”