illinois Central Chicago District - Monee Rebuild

Started by vinceg, September 10, 2018, 10:46:43 PM

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vinceg

If you look back a couple of notes to the picture of the full front wall, you can see that the first and second floors are made from separate parts (you can see it in this pic also). The interface where those meet is a seam that will be covered up by a 1x6 piece of trim. That piece of trim will be 3" (scale) above the seam and 3" below. That would mean that the trim would interfere with the bay window unless the trim is notched or the bay would rest on just that skinny one-by stock. To deal with this, the kit gives you a 3" sill on which the bay rests. Here's a pic:



I have to say, I am quite amazed by the engineering in this kit. Almost feels as though you could build the real Tennessee Pass Depot from this design. Part of me is complaining about all of the detail work but I think I am mostly happy that I am learning by getting a different way to look at things.

That's it for this evening. Tomorrow I hope to get the whole structure pulled together -- at least without the roofs.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Made some progress in the last couple of days.finished the walls, put in the flooring for the second floor, and glued the frame parts to the brick foundation. Here's a pic:



I started to put in some of the trim.

More shortly.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Installing the bay window is next. Before finishing all of the trim on the bay, I tried a test fit into the opening in the second story:



You can see that the opening is just a little too wide -- a few scale inches or so. I found that I could snug it up by cutting a couple of scale 2x8s, one for each side, to serve as spacers. I painted their edges to match the rest of the exterior wood.

More shortly.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

#243
Here's where I'm at now. The bay window is attached and all of the wood trim is installed. Here is the front:



The view from the north side:



The back (remember that back brick wall will be completely underground so I didn't bother finishing it much.



And the south wall. The trim is not installed here yet as there is still an enclosed stairway that has to be built and attached here.



This picture really highlights the inaccuracy of my build. You can see that the top of the south (side) wall is noticeably lower than the top of the front wall. Turns out that the gap exactly matches the width of the 2nd floor sheet, perhaps suggesting that I should have been resting the entire second floor wall structure on top of the floor rather than around it (and resting on the foundation). But, for that to have worked (I did do test fittings earlier on) I would had to have trimmed the walls a bit. The walls are too long to make that work right out of the box. So, I'm not sure what I did wrong but I am hoping it is minor enough that it can be covered up when the roofing is applied.

Two things for tomorrow:

1. Decide whether I want to try to do some second floor interior for the building. If not, I may need a view block behind the bay window. Seems a shame to waste the hardwood floor but this building will be relatively far away from the view. I think I will likely save my efforts for something that is nearer to the aisle.

2. Start on the roof. This building has two hipped roofs (I just learned that term when reading the manual). I have never built one of these. Looks difficult. Looks difficult in real life, too.

More tomorrow.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Before checking out for the evening, I wanted to ask a question about roofing:

1. For most (all?) of the kits I built early on I assembled the subroofing on the building first and then applied the shingles/tarpaper/metal/whatever afterwards. This kit recommends that you apply the roofing first, then put it all together. What are your preference? Is there a good reason to do it one way versus the other? Seems like it would mostly be a matter of taste but I thought I would ask.

Cheers.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

PRR Modeler

Looks great Steve. I have done roofing both ways.
Curt Webb
The Late Great Pennsylvania Railroad
Freelanced PRR Bellevue Subdivision

PaulS

Coming together very nicely Steve,
Scale modeling is often an exercise in problem solving and you are doing a very nice job on this build.
I too have done the roofing in both approaches but generally if you can do it 'flat' while on the bench rather than the structure, that is my preferred method.
Looking forward to following your progress here,
--Paul
Modeling the Atlantic & White Mtn Railway

vinceg

Thanks Curt and Paul. I think I will put the shingles on first. Given the complication of the hipped roof as well as having to work around the bay window structure, I think it will be easier to apply shingles first.

The only concern I have is that I suspect some of the parts expanded when I did the "double-sided alcohol and put it under a heavy book" process on the parts. I saw this directly with the floors. If the same thing happened with the walls (which might be the case as just discussed in this thread), then the roof might end up being a bit too small and it will be more difficult to add a couple of courses of shingles after the rest of the roof is shingled. I will keep an eye on that as I'm preparing the surfaces to make sure I can extended it a bit, if necessary.

Regards,
Vince
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

Mark Dalrymple

Looking good, Vince.

I do tend to put roofing material on first and then add to the structure.  I think the biggest plus for this order is you are less likely to damage the structure while fiddling around with all that roofing material.  Once you have this hip roof under your belt I urge you to do more.  Often the flat roofs we imaging are behind those parapet walls on city buildings are in fact gable and hip roofs.  It adds a lot of interest to the scene.

You could take the side wall off, add chocolate brown trim to the bottom of the wall, and then reattach it (depending on the glue you have used).  The trim would kind of match the trim on the other wall and raise the top of the windows to line up with the others.  Is the side wall also low against the wall at the other end as well?  If it does you could just add a piece of trim to the top of the wall in your cladding colour.  When the overhang of the roof is on the kit you would barely notice it - at least much less than a gap.

Cheers, Mark.

vinceg

Working on the main roof now. Here is the roof card with the main roof pieces cut out:



This is REALLY heavy card stock. It takes many more passes with the knife to cut through this stuff. That's good.

The instructions do not really have you do any bracing other than a couple of small pieces in the corners to help line things up. I don't think I like that idea...will probably put in some bracing of some sort.

More shortly.

Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Some of you may have remember that when I was building Dexter's Dead End, I was whining about how hard it was to use the Campbell shingles. I was using Canopy glue in combination with the glue backing on the shingles and the shingles had a strong tendency to warp away from the kerfs, causing a "smile" in the strip that I did a bad job of controlling. A couple folks reminded me that 3M transfer tape would be a much better solution. It was sort of a "duh" moment for me as I use that tape frequently for other types of roofing. I guess I got caught up with the fact that the Campbell's shingles already have glue on them and that using a wet glue in addition would also serve to active the shingle glue.

Regardless, I decided to use the Campbells again here, this time with transfer tape. Works great, of course. Here's the back roof in progress:



I still need some practice on this but this method is clearly better for lots of reasons: (1) easier to fight the "smile", (2) doesn't allow glue to ooze under the shingles which will make it easier to lift up shingles later for a more weathered look, (3) Once you use a finger nail to push the top of the strip into the glue, it stays -- no worries about working somewhere else on the strip and having the first part warp on you without you noticing until all the glue is dried, (4) keeping the top of the strip straight and fighting the smile tends to bunch up the shingles a bit, popping them out, which results in a bit more overall texture to the roof.

Anyway, you all already knew all of that. Thanks again for the comments a couple of months ago.

And, as an added bonus, I have lots of partial spools of Campbell shingles from other kits (you never use them all). Lots of inventory I can now use.

More shortly.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Interesting problem to solve. Notice on the main roofing sheet that there is a little diamond-shaped piece called a "cricket." This is supposed to go between the bay roof and the main roof. This is another angled piece to keep the rain runoff from collecting at the base of the bay window structure in back.

To account for the that, the front main roof section and the rear bay roof section have areas they tell you to not shingle. Because I have been seeing some measurement discrepancies so far (tens of thousanths), I am concerned that I will end up not shingling an area that later doesn't match up well with where it needs to be. Then I will have a difficult time putting in additional shingles to fill the gap. So, I am going to shingle over these areas and assume I can install the cricket over them when necessary or perhaps even cut shingles away, if needed.

I sense some expletives coming in my future.....

Here are the relevant pieces:



Note also that the bay roof has the points cut off of the left and right roof pieces (side "D" and "B"). That is because that bay roof theoretically has some interference with the main roof. Again, I did not make this modification. My plan is to put the main roof in place and then see where things settle out with the bay roof at that time.

I am not showing it in this picture but the front piece for the bay roof is bigger than the back one (The "C" piece with "no shingles"). That would make sense if the back has interference and has to be truncated. You can tell that from the picture because the B and D pieces have more shingle courses than the C piece does.

Yep - gonna have some "fun" before too long....

More shortly.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Here are the four main roof pieces with shingles applied:



The instructions call for building the roof away from the building and then installing it. I think that makes sense. But, I am still concerned that when I paint and weather it, it will be subject to warping. So, I will add some 1/8" stock to the pieces before putting them together. While I'm doing that, I will think about whether to weather before of after the roof is installed.

By the way, notice that on the south roof (the one on the right) there is a small area unshingled. That is where the chimney goes. No harm in doing that as there are no measurement dependencies there.

That's it for a while. I'll be back when I have these four pieces put together.

Cheers,
Vince
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

OK, time to glue the main roof together. I've never done this before. I assume there is no thinking to be done other than making sure that the roof eaves are perpendicular and the roof parts are touching at the seams. The geometry should just take care of itself. I guess.

I decided to do this the same way I do walls - do two "L" sections independently and then glue them together.

I decided to use a carpenter's square to keep things perpendicular. It conveniently let me slip the shingle overhand under the square while catching the card stock underlayment up against the square for a good 90 degree angle. Here's the back roof and south side:



and here's the front roof and north side:



More shortly.
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

vinceg

Here I'm gluing the two Ls together. I ended up doing the two seams independently and then one more gluing with some weight to tighten up the gap on the top. Here's a pic of gluing the first seam



More shortly
Vince

Protolancing the Illinois Central Chicago District from Chicago to Kankakee

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