Building two SP depots
The thick stucco walls on the Glendale depot (above) recall the adobe blocks and plastering used on the old Spanish missions,
the first coat was dry, I applied a sec- ond coat with a bristle brush and, once an area was done, I stippled the sur- face to give it a slight stucco texture. I did this over the entire structure. The finish color coat was slightly thinned Americana brand Desert Sand acrylic paint. Even if two color applications are done with thinned paint, the previ- ous stippling will show through. One could always stipple the color coat if desired.
Now for the roof: I used ¹/₁₆″-thick il- lustration board. This was cut to size and bonded into place with white glue, then stiffeners were added to keep things from warping. The undersides of the overhangs were painted with acrylic Burnt Umber paint.
I used Plastruct O scale Spanish tile plastic roofing sheets on the pitched roofs. Contact cement was applied spar- ingly, as it can eat the plastic. I went back along the edges with cyanoacrylate cement for a good, tight bond and have encountered no trouble with the sheets becoming loose. Thin, single-tile strips were cut for the ridges and glued in place. The edges were filled with spack- ling paste just like the real ones, which are mortared-in with cement. A base coat of Americana Pueblo acrylic paint was applied overall. The under-eave rafter tails and trim were fashioned from basswood for the main structure, and a pattern was made for the trim un- der the baggage end eaves and cast. The windows were now given a spray finish of Rust-Oleum®
brown and then
glazed. All lower floor windows were given a coat of black on the inside. I used cyanoacrylate cement to bond them in place. The upper windows
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making Balsa Foam a good choice for these models. It is rigid, carves easily and is not greatly affected by changes in humidity.
were simply glued in place with no black paint on the rear surface so as to show the drapes. These were painted in several light acrylic colors for a base coat, then shadows and highlights were brushed on. The small baggage window was cut from a door transom casting, and the baggage door was scratchbuilt.
Now came the really fun part, the
arched entryways. These were perhaps the most time-consuming if not diffi- cult part of this whole project. The good part was that the doorway at Santa Barbara was less complex than the one at Glendale. A basic shaped form was fashioned from balsa and basswood. I found that a can of Amy’s Organic Lentil Soup®
wrapped in sandpaper
was a perfect fit to finish-sand the ra- dius of the arch. (Presumably, other soup cans would work just as well as long as the diameter was right.) The fancy hole in the upper portion
was first drilled out and an upside down triangle cut to connect the circu- lar holes. All this needed to be done very carefully and accurately. Next, a layer of .060″ styrene was rough-cut to fit over the face of this basic block. An- other, matching, set of holes and a tri- angle was cut in this sheet with the opening in the styrene made slightly larger to create a stepped-down recess effect. This had to be done carefully to look right and took a while. I was lucky and did it right the first time. The styrene sheet was then bonded onto the wooden piece using cyanoacrylate cement, a touchy operation to be sure. It worked, and after a sigh of relief I proceeded to cut the massive square columns on either side of the basic
form. These were balsa faced with a sheet of ¹/₄″ basswood to get the proper thickness. Both columns were trimmed to size and glued in place with white glue. I then continued to add strips of styrene to build up the levels on the de- sign and details of the entryway. The styrene overlay helped a great deal since styrene to styrene is easier to glue than styrene to wood, especially with the strips that needed to be formed and curved. However, plastic solvent cement can work very well for bonding styrene to wood because the plastic melts slightly and grabs the grain of the wood. This is okay for sim- ple pieces that don’t need to be bent. A variety of styrene shapes and sizes were assembled for the fancy trim (which was simplified to some extent or I would still be working on it). I used .060″ square for the straight and flat pieces, but where the pieces needed to be curved, I used two strips of .030″, each bent and bonded in place separately. To- gether, they formed the .060″ width; this was far easier to do for bends around a tight radius. The caps on top of the large columns at either side were fashioned from bits of Balsa Foam sanded to shape. It took many individual pieces to do all of the details on the arched entry- way, and one piece at a time was the only way to do it. The “curls” at the up- per center were built up using thin styrene and a paper punch. Combining small bits of styrene and .030″-diameter styrene rod eventually yielded an ac- ceptable replica of the ornamentation. Joints were kept as neat as possible, but the entire entryway would get a coat of textured gesso in the end, so I hoped tiny discrepancies wouldn’t show. Still,
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