Gothic Arch Dairy Barn in HO styrene

[jbvb]

A fairly simple scratchbuild of a fairly large (for most model RRs) post-1950 structure, brought over from now-gone RR-Line:
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12-Nov-2011: On my HO B&M Eastern Route, I have been working on a farmstead on the south bank of the Rowley River. The house is a kit, but I wanted a large, modern (for the 1950s) dairy barn with reasonable space for animals, vehicles etc. I only had room for a half-structure, up against the backdrop.

There are several kits in the right size range, but I didn't really want to build only half a kit. Also they were older structures; What I'm trying to show here is someone who decided to "get big" rather than "get out", with the blue "tombstone" silos on the backdrop and the bankers grinning as they watch him try to pay off the debt.

Searching the web, I found a plan with the right general look. But Midwest Plan Service, a consortium of land-grant universities, appears to have given in to the trend to monetize EVERYTHING and I can't find the plan I worked from on an open site.  However, archive.org grabbed copies of it in 2022 and 2023.  Ask for 72326.pdf and give 'em a little donation for keeping what was paid for by tax dollars available to people who actually pay taxes.

I had been thinking about this for years, but finally got off the dime.

I have room for the full (half) depth of 18 feet, and height is no problem. I cut the length down to about 100 feet to allow for pens, sheds etc. so it'll actually be about 30 stalls - still pretty big for an HO farm. First, I made a rough template for the building's profile. I had corrugated cardboard handy, but shirt cardboard would have been better.



Some time back, I bought a 4x8 of .040 styrene, so in the vein of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail", I cut off an 18 scale foot wide strip. I made the floor 101 feet long to match my hardboard foundation. Then I marked off 6 interior formers and two ends .040 taller. I cut them out with EMT scissors, clamped them all together and filed them to the same profile:



I cut out a front wall 9' high and started to assemble it, using liquid cement, tube cement and little bits of cut-offs as bracing.




More as I progress, but my wash needed to be hung.

15-Nov-2011: I got the roof assembled. In that "looks like a nail" theme, I decided to use .040 styrene because I could get the 14" width in one piece. It was enough trouble to form that I would probably splice .020 if doing it again.



I tried rolling the curve into it, then tried a heat gun over a 1 gal. glass pickle jar as a form.

The soffit is an Evergreen HO scale 4x10. Elastics, fingers and MEK closed that gap and I trimmed the roof this morning.

[jbvb]

TrainClown commented:

If it was me, I would score the roof length wise with a knife, the score lines would be about 1/4" apart. This would help the polystyrene bend to take the curve and also make it look like planks. Once you put the shingles on, well, no more score lines.
Just my opinion. Nice project, by the way

mabloodhound (Dave Mason) commented:

Chris.......missed you. Of course Chris is right, scribing the styrene would have made the job easier. With a scribe half the thickness deep, it would have bent as easily as .020. Very nice James and this will certainly make a good backdrop building. One little trick to consider before you go much farther, is to add a slight amount of the roof on the back side, into the wall. This way, the ridge stands proud of the wall and the building actually looks much better this way. It doesn't have to be much, just enough to break that hard ridge line on the
wall and the plane where it would now touch would be hidden.

21-Nov-2011: Thanks for the hints Dave & Chris; I got the roof assembled ok and now I'm working on the side sheathing and framing the windows & doors. I'll try scribing the next time I want to form a shape like that. Given that the foundation is in place, I don't have a lot of scope for setting it proud of the backdrop, but I may be able to work in something like that when I figure out what to use for a ridge vent (the plans show a heart-shaped cross section, probably sheet metal).

23-Nov-2011: I had the wood stove going yesterday, so I brought the barn project downstairs to work on it in the warmth.

The plans don't include windows, but my farmer and all his neighbors would remember the '38 hurricane vividly: I made them 2 feet square and 10 feet apart to suit the 24" stud spacing. I set them high because the barn is going to see a lot of cow traffic.



They and the door are framed with .010x.060 strip. I scribed the tongue & groove lines 9 scale inches apart with a square and a fine stainless sculpting pick I got as part of a "tool guy"'s set. 20:20 hindsight: I should have allowed for the extra depth so I could have applied .020 v-groove sheet instead. But I wanted eaves on the ends and it didn't take *that* long.

I need to finish the end doors and then it'll be ready for paint. I'm not sure how successful it will be to model half-doors open, but I can experiment with the left end, which won't be visible when the building is in place.

1-Dec-2011:  Answering a question: EMT scissors have the blades at an angle to the handles so it's easier to cut large flat sheets. Look on Amazon for pictures. Mine are inexpensive, from a "tool guy" at the Amherst show in West Springfield, MA.

I finished the left end, using .060 channel and .040 car siding for the door, with .060 angle for the stops.



I'm thinking of doing a "putting up hay" scene, so I'm leaving hayloft doors open. You can see my experiment with Dave's advice to extend the barn a little past the ridge line:



I also used Evergreen car siding for the people door, with a pin for the knob. I went to bed rather than finish this end's door and scribe the board joints. Painting will wait for sunlight.

This project is the first time I tried EMT scissors on .040 styrene. They don't curl the left-hand side of the cut noticeably, but the right-hand side does get curl. Mine have fine serrations on the lower blade to keep it from slipping. These embossed themselves into the cut edge in places, but not in a way that I had to clean it up. I will continue to use scribe/break for most, if not all straight cuts but the scissors were much faster at making the curved roof formers.

2-Dec-2011: Styrene fabrication is finished, with the right end door and the ridge vent. The closeup I took of the vent before assembly didn't come out, but it's visible in this picture. I made it from scale 6x12 with .060 x .030 under it. Before I glued them together, I formed the shape shown on the plan by scraping the corners with a knife edge followed by filing. I use a big flat file to form fairly uniform shapes on strip by holding it against the file while I pull the strip through my fingers.



I haven't seen this style of galvanized ridge vent on barns since I was a kid; I don't think they lasted well. But in that era, you were more likely to get the loan if you made the extension agent happy, and this couldn't have been built without the loan...

[jbvb]

17-Dec-2011: I got the basic painting done earlier this week. I tried some old 'paint-can' Floquil Boxcar Red, but didn't like the brown hue, so I mixed a bit of white into some 'square bottle' Boxcar Red (which was really close to Caboose Red) and got this.



I used SP Lettering Gray for the galvanized parts. And didn't wait long enough before painting the trim white, so I need to go back over it when I do the end door.

The cardboard equipment shed mockup is in the most practical location; maybe I'll leave the sides off so the framing and parked equipment will be visible.

A quick update to say that, alas for my finite supply of "finicking", the only photos I've found on the web that aren't shingled have A) a modern membrane roof or B) 6'x12'? sheet metal panels with ridges about every 12". That would be interesting, but it would take almost as long to form all that aluminum foil as it would to shingle it.

22-Dec-2011:  Here's the photo I decided to follow - an older barn than mine, but the roof looks about the right vintage:

< WOW!  That was all of frustrating, cool, bizarre and an affirmation of human laziness.  The old URL was "www.uvm.edu/~hp206/2010/Essex/Barns/99bhrWEB.jpg". Me searching for it offended both Goog and DDGo so much I had to clear their cookies to get either to respond.  But then I thought about people and searched for the filename "99bhrWEB.jpg". And there it was on the "Vermont Barn Census 2010" page that wouldn't respond to me in the first place. Took me long enough so I saved my own copy. >



Phil, this will be about 24" from the closest viewers, and the ridges on the prototype look like 1" or less relief, so I decided to try scribing it. Here's where I am now:



I could get a nice metal texture by laminating aluminum foil over this, but I wouldn't know how the relief would look until I had brushed it down on the glue. White glue will work on styrene for laminations like this, so I could undo it with a soak, but I think I will see what I can achieve with the airbrush first. Which probably requires a nitrogen refill, so off to the shopping maelstrom (where the welding supply place moved a few years ago).

5-Nov-2018: Finally posting a photo showing the finished roof here:



IIRC the paint is Scalecoat 'Graphite & Oil' which I like for galvanized steel. I didn't manage to scribe all the horizontal 'panel' lines exactly straight, but the scribed approach looks good from a 24" viewing distance.

[Janbouli]

Looks great James .

[KentuckySouthern]

Good looking barn, James.  Quite a few of that style in Michigan around where I live.  Sadly big farm barns are a dying breed.  Newer construction is mostly pole barn style.  The area Amish do have a couple new build old style barns but not the arced roof types. 

Thanks for sharing. 

Karl

[Zephyrus52246]

Great barn, James.  

Jeff