Building the Timberline Miner’s Union Hotel
ened, interlocking stones were carved to finish these areas.
black with Folk Art® brand acrylic paint, making sure the mortar lines were fully colored. When this was dry the faces of the individual blocks were brushed with other colors. I was careful to not get any of the stone color into the blackened mortar lines.
The foundation stones were painted
When the paint was dry, the entire foundation was lightly brushed with a shoe dye and alcohol mix to blend everything together. I had to be very careful with this mixture, because if it was brushed on too hard it would re- move some of the paint from the stone faces.
Custom-made lap siding
I made my own lap siding for the hotel. The pieces were cut from a 1″×8″ plank of basswood I purchased several years ago, and it has supplied wood for several models. First, a 10″-diameter blade in a standard shop saw was used to remove 8″ scale thickness strips from the plank. These slabs were then cut into 2″ scale thick pieces of stripwood by using a Micro-Mark Miniature Precision saw. One edge of these pieces was carefully milled to add a small, recessed curved lip. Some reference sources refer to this style of mating edge as drop siding, shadow siding, or ship-lap siding. I saw a photo of a building with this kind of siding in one of the modeling magazines, and I thought I could reproduce that type of siding myself.
I used the same vertical router ma- chine that I used to remove material from the building side pieces for the foundation, but this time I used a rounded bit. Creating a hold-down jig out of some scrap lumber, I was able to make a trough or slot where the long strips of 2″×8″ scale basswood could be safely pushed into the cutting bit. It took a while to make what I thought would be enough siding for the entire building, and when I was finished I had a few feet of it left over.
Before attaching the siding to the fiberboard sub-walls, vertical reference lines were drawn to represent 24″ wooden stud spacing on them. These helped determine where I could place joints as I was gluing on the lengths of siding. This was done using Aleene’s Tacky Glue one board at a time, cover- ing all the door and window openings. A small square helped keep the boards level. After the glue had dried, the ex- cess material was removed from the openings with a sharp knife blade. The wood was then brushed with the black dye and alcohol solution, and when that was dry, it was lightly dry-brushed with Folk Art Ivory White paint. 68
The computer-made signs were printed on cardstock (above) and sealed with a clear flat spray. The board and wood grain effect was created in Photoshop® Elements 7. The carved foundation stones (below) were made from Squadron White Putty applied along the bot- tom of the walls. The stones were painted with black paint to highlight the mortar lines; then tan and limestone paints were dry-brushed on the stone faces in a random pattern.
Windows
Several years ago, I received an abun- dant supply of laser-cut windows and doors. Being the pack-rat that I am, they were set aside and used a little at a time on various scratchbuilding pro- jects. After doing a rough count of win- dow openings, I found this structure would require 51 double-hung windows. Those were fairly simple to make using basic laser-cut window construction techniques. However, the lower level of the middle unit, where the dining room would be, required the construction of five double-wide, double-hung windows. They were a little trickier to make, but they turned out fine. Assembling
the standard double-
hung windows was fairly straightfor- ward. The effort came in combining two
of them into the double-wide windows. I used the thin frets between the win- dow components on the carrier sheet, gluing them together with Dr. Mikes 2 cyanoacrylate adhesive.
This time I tried a different tech- nique, for me at least, to glaze the win- dows. First, the assembled components were dry-brushed with the Ivory White paint. Next, clear cellophane tape was applied with its sticky side facing to- ward the outside of one of the frames for a test. A small, soft bristle brush was used to gently apply Future® Floor Wax to the sticky surface, being careful to keep it off the muntins. Unfortunately, when the wax dried, the tape became wrinkled and very wavy. I removed it and took the window to the sink and dipped it in a small pud- FEBRUARY 2012
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