Trackside elevation
was sprayed with flat gray primer paint from a home improvement store to cover the bright white of the styrene in case any gaps showed between the siding pieces.
The foundation was then added. The
Chooch flexible stone wall material has a self-adhesive backing but some addi- tional help from thin cyanoacrylate ce- ment was needed in a few spots. The “stone” was applied directly over the door and window openings. Once at- tached, I used a knife with a sharp No.11 blade to cut out the stone from the openings. Now it was time to prepare the clap- board siding. I chose Northeastern HO scale 1″×10″ stripwood. I experiment- ed with how many strips would be needed to cover the walls, did the math, and ordered the needed quantity of planking. It would be weathered pri- or to installation. The weathering was done in three
ing side, the piece was snapped out. Using square .250″ styrene to rein-
force the corners, I assembled the walls with styrene solvent cement. The foun- dation sub-walls were assembled in a similar manner but the lengths of the
Aisle side elevation
pieces were reduced by twice the thick- ness of the Chooch flexible stone walls. Wooden walls on buildings overhang their foundations by the thickness of the boards (this protects the sill plates). The completed building core
stages. The first involved a way to hold lots of stripwood boards at once. I may be crazy, but I was not so far gone as to want to weather the wood strips piece by piece. As you can see in the photos, two parallel strips of blue painters’ tape were used, sticky side up, to hold the wood. The liquids used in the weather- ing process sometimes loosened the wood from the gentle adhesive of the blue tape, but tape with a stronger ad- hesive, like masking tape, would have been too strong and not release the fin- ished wood without breaking it. Next came two applications of Builders in Scale Silver Wood solution (
http://www.cccrow.com/) to get a nice weathered gray. Once this was dry, the final step was to use Doan’s paint weathering method. I did the strip- wood in batches, about 15 to 20 strips at a time. Turpentine was brushed onto the weathered wood, then Polly Scale Depot Buff acrylic paint was brushed on while the turpentine was still wet. After the paint set for a few minutes a piece of blue tape was used to pull off parts of the paint. This takes some practice, and I would recommend prac- ticing on scrap wood until you are sat- isfied with your technique. Once everything had dried, I careful- ly lifted the stripwood off the tape. In many cases the weathering treatment had raised the grain of the wood, so I pulled each piece through some 400- grit sandpaper to smooth out the sur- face (necessary for the stripwood to be applied evenly to the building core, plus the grain was certainly too rough to be “in scale.”). The sanding also en- hanced the weathered look I was after. Weathering and painting the wood strips was the most tedious and time- consuming part of the project, but
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN 65
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