Good morning John and all who follow,

Worked late again last night and more of the same on tap for this evening.   

Do you remember this visit John?  More fun times.  Left to right - Bill Eaton aka The Judge, John (S&S RR) and Howard Zane.


Have a great one!

Looking really nice, Bob.

Coming on a treat.

Cheers, Mark.

Thanks Mark!  This is a really fun kit to build.  It has a number of interesting things going on.  Doug did a great job coming up with the design on this one. 

Wow!  That's quite a complex.  It's a good thing it's going to be featured on the Summit level.  That will significantly reduce the chances of somebody accidentally damaging it while trying to reach over it.   

Hey Bob:

Looks like you are moving right along.

Karl

Thanks Karl!  I'm not moving along at your speed but I'm getting there.  It's been a while since I posted an update.   

Finally!  My favorite part of any build.  Assembling the walls.  This is when things really start to come together.  I used a square to keep things, well, square. 


Okay.  Back to the crackle experiment.  When everything dried there was just a tiny patch of cracked paint on the left hand sample.  Barely visible.  I pondered whether or not I want to apply the Deco Art One Step Crackle to the stucco or just let them be the way they were.  I went ahead and did it but it wasn't really worth the effort.  There's a little crackle here and there but barely visible.  I used this stuff once before on a the Red Light District build and got the cracked paint effect albeit a bit out of scale and more noticeable.  Oh well.  In the end it didn't negatively affect anything.


Now for the sometimes challenging part.  A sign painted on with a stencil.  I used a black craft paint and sponged the paint on after dabbing the sponge on a sheet of scrap paper to remove most of the paint. Don't try for much coverage here or the paint will bleed under the stencil.  It took a while to get the lettering done.


The red arrow gave me more trouble then the lettering did.  First off, I should have masked the arrow off so I didn't get any black paint on it when doing the lettering.  It was kind of a pain to cover up that little bit of black when everything else was white.  It affected the tone of the red paint.  I also applied the red a little too heavy and had some bleed under the template.  Scrubbing off some of the excess with a fine point swab dipped in rubbing alcohol and then touching things up with a the white paint corrected the issue.  Some more weathering later on will make the sign looked faded and cover up any minor flaws.


Time to test fit the clapboard structure onto the stucco portion.  It fit pretty well but I couldn't quite get both side walls to sit flat.  One would but not the other.


I found I had to sand the bottom edge of the front of the structure just a wee bit to get it fit better.  The bottom edge rests on the lower roof.


More in a moment....

Okay, so where was I?  Oh yeah.  I was applied stucco to a scrap piece of photo mounting board and then tried a couple different approaches to using Delta Crackle Medium and DecoArt One Step Crackle to see what worked best to get that cracked paint effect.  More on that in a bit.


While waiting for the experiment to dry a bit I started adding blinds and curtains to the windows.  I like the blinds printed on the one sheet so I cut them out a bit oversized and added glue around the edges to glue to the walls behind the windows.


I made sure to check them to see if I got them straight enough and raised to various levels.


And there's a wall with curtains and blinds in the lower windows.


More in a moment...

Then I started cutting out and applying curtains.  These were made up from a heavy duty paper napkin that came from a restaurant somewhere.


I glued the curtains in place.  I kept a few pretty open because I have an idea for something I'm going to add in one of the rooms later on.   

Morning all,

Worked late last night.  Working late again tonight.  I already made up my mind to move retirement date up by at least 6 months.  Maybe more.  Two years, eight months sounds better than three years, two months.   

Memories from the Altoona EXPO in 2017.  John (S&S RR) and I did a little rail fanning while we were in the area.  Good times!   


Have a great one!

This scene just keeps getting better and better.  Nice to see Danny has been included in the story.  He needs a business named after him on the A&S.  Just sayin'.