marked with a hard pencil. The under- side of the plywood was treated in the exact same manner to avoid any warp- ing. If only one surface is painted or has another surface glued to it, it caus- es tension between the two and warp- ing will occur. (Not can, but will.) The Glendale depot was completed and then glued to its base, but Santa Bar- bara needed to be built in place on the base, section-by-section.
The window and door patterns were completed next. These were made from styrene strips. Just two windows and one door pattern took care of all I would need for this structure. A rubber mold was made and the parts cast in resin. A typical column, along with its base and capital, were also fashioned from styrene and foam for a pattern for another mold.
whose blade was just under ¹/₁₆″ thick, being careful to run right down the center of the foam. The foam sheets are not necessarily exactly the same thick- ness, so some care and planning need- ed to be done. I laid out the sheets to be joined as close to the same thickness as possible to avoid problems later and used white glue to join the splines and foam sheets together. They were weighted down on a flat surface to dry. The base for both models was a piece of half-inch thick plywood. Both sides were covered with illustration board glued down with contact cement. The top surface became the “concrete” plat- form with the joints and cracks
I used the castings to measure the openings for the doors and windows, which were only going to be on the front wall of the model. The rear is blank, like a building flat. I marked the doors and windows with a pencil and traced around each area to be recessed with a sharp No. 11 blade, cutting in about ¹/₈″ or so, just enough to guide a chisel. I then used a ¼″ wood chisel to gouge out the recesses. As noted, these didn’t need to be all the way through as there was no interior in the model. The castings were used in each opening to check for proper fit. The upper three windows had drapes carved into the recess instead of a flat foam surface. These windows were not painted black behind the glass so the drapes would show. The main “box” could now be assem-
bled. Before I did so, I carefully meas- ured for the patio roof and used the table saw to cut a ¹/₁₆″ slot down the
two walls that would receive the flat roof. Later, I would slip in the card- stock roof for a nice, solid fit. I used white glue for the box assembly but painted the edges to be glued with artist’s gesso to seal them first. Quar- ter-inch square wood braces were added on the interior corners and along the length of the two longer walls as stiffeners.
I then proceeded to fabricate two more boxes from the foam sheets for the “wings” of the building. These boxes only had three sides. One of each would go on either end of the large box and be braced similarly. The window and door openings were recessed before assem- bly, and the arches at the baggage end were cut out before the walls were as- sembled. Now I had a set of three boxes all glued up. The corner joints were filled with spackling paste and lightly sanded when dry.
Next came the little corner details that mimicked the column trim. These were castings, of course, from the columns. I cut them to fit into slots cut into the corners of the structure where appropriate. This was sort of an annoy- ing little detail to do, but very impor- tant. The column between the baggage end and the main building was re- cessed into the wall, and all joints were filled with spackling paste again. I cut a small piece of Balsa Foam to represent the chimney on the right wall and glued it in place. The part above the roof was installed after the roofing material was installed. That completed the major construction of the main building. I used gesso to give the entire model an undercoat of white. Gesso is a thick acrylic medium used to prime canvases for oil painting. When
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