Simplifying hip roofs
With its new hip roof, Revell’s depot looks a lot like the Rutland’s depot in Grand Isle, Ver- mont (above). At right, the brick depot from Walthers has had its foundation removed and is undergoing a roof replacement to rep- resent the Delaware & Hudson depot in Co- hoes, New York. While this is a complex roof, any hip roof needs support where the panels meet or wherever it changes angles.
Building such a roof, however, can be
an unsurpassable challenge. One little error and your hip roof sits on the struc- ture like a cocked hat. Ahh, but there is an easy solution which I have used for any number of complicated roofs. Such roofs don’t faze me in the slightest. The trick is to start with a roof base and then build a vertical support at every spot where two roof planes intersect. You can fiddle with each rib to get what you want and then, when you add the roof pieces, they can be adjusted to fit with- out changing the angles. To lay out a hip roof with the same
pitch on all four sides, take the width of the roof base and divide by half. This will be the same dimension on all four sides. The longer side will have a rec- tangular section in the middle, the dif- ference between the long dimension and the crosswise one. The description of this is much more complicated than actually building it.
Scribe a line down the center of the roof base on the longer axis. Make the rectangular middle section and glue it upright. Now measure the diagonal distance from the end of this rectangle
54
out to the corners and make four right angle triangles. Finally,
add
“roof
plates” on top of the ribs. In this case, the roof was covered with slate shin- gles. The roof brackets in the Atlas kit were simply cut down to fit. The basic body of the Atlas kit is a scale 17′-0″×31′-6″, so the rectangular rib along the center is 14′-6″ long. In order to make a 30-degree roof slope, the height of this section should be five scale feet tall. (The base of this triangle is half of 17′-0″ and the simplest way to do this is forget trigonometry and just lay out a 30-degree angle and measure the height for a given base.)
The final roof panels are dimen- sioned as follows: the big pieces are 42
scale feet along the bottom, 14′-6″ along the top, and 21 feet along each angled section. The small pieces are 27 feet along the bottom and of course matching 21 feet along the two sides. The Atlas model comes with a repre- sentation of an aluminum phone booth. Earlier wooden ones would not be posi- tioned outside. Such phone booths date from after steam so it was simply left off with no attempt to hide the scars. We also “hip-lifted” a Revell depot for our Grand Isle, Vermont, scene. Other potential candidates would be the old AHM Arlee and Rico depots, the Life- Like depot based on the B&O’s one at Sykesville, Maryland, several Walthers kits–and on and on.
MAY 2014
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