Rugg Manufacturing - SRMW Kit 170

[vinceg]

Thanks, Tom. I appreciate the positive comments.

[Opa George]

Vince,
I am getting caught up with your build and am very impressed with your detailed roof work. The irregularities shouldn't concern you too much--it looks great despite being a pain in the artichoke. All the different angles add a ton of visual interest.

[vinceg]

Thank you, George. I have purposely stayed away from the kit for a few days so I can look at it with fresh eyes. It definitely looks a little better when I walk away for a while. And I agree, this kit in particular has a lot of visual interest with all of the interesting roof lines and textures.

[S&S RR]

Your modeling is great! I find that it really helps to get away from a build for a few days before I start going in with the eagle eye for changes or fixes. Thanks for sharing your build with us.

[vinceg]

Thanks, John. I should have some more updates this weekend.

[Dave K.]

Still enjoying your thread, Vince. Busy with back-to-school but following along...👍🏻

[vinceg]

Thanks, Dave.

Is that you going back to school? Kids? Or maybe you're a teacher?

[tom.boyd.125]

Vince,
Following along on your model build, the photos will be a helpful reference, can't wait to raise the walls on Rugg here too, walls & castings painted and the windows were just glazed....
Tommy

[Dave K.]

Thanks, Dave.

Is that you going back to school? Kids? Or maybe you're a teacher?

Teacher...just three more years!😜

[vinceg]

I finished the roof on the Middle building. As I said earlier, I wanted the weathering to be a bit more subdued on this one. Here's the result. First, looking at the building from the west:



and now looking from the east:



I do think I like this look, including the "frayed" edges at the bottom of the panels. I think I discovered at least part of my problem: I'm an STBG (Single Technique Binging Guy). A few months ago I discovered the technique of using a suspension of chalk dust in alcohol to color strip wood and other materials (Props to Brett Gallant at Sierra West). Bingo. I had a new hammer and everything looked like a nail.  So, I first tried using this technique to do all the weathering. And, it does seem to have some good use. The problem is that the low surface tension of the alcohol causes the color to spread far and wide quickly. That's fine if you're coloring strip wood. But if you're looking for localized rust effects on a metal panel, not so much. I think it's also worsened by the fact that the metal panel is also a relatively smooth surface, even with the primer coat on it.

So, the answer was to weather with paint. Duh. You can weather with paint. Who knew? The second picture above (view from the east) is done that way. I used a couple of different rust colors - some old Polly S Rust that I still had lying around and some newer Microlux Rust. In some places I also sprinkled on some rust-colored chalk powder while the paint was still wet to give it a little texture. I also tried thinning the paint in a couple of places as well. It's good for some contrast but in general, seems to create the same sort of problem as the alcohol. For example of thinned paint, look at the second picture, start at the elevator tower (slate-shingled clapboard box), and look at the third panel to the left. That's thinned. Very muted. Nice effect for rust-impregnated runoff from a rusty thing of some sort, but too subtle for my taste for an actually rusted metal thing.

This picture also shows the roof on the elevator tower is finished. The oxidized copper ridge cap is there. It need a little more work as it isn't quite as varied as the ridge on the main building roof and it is coming up a little bit on the right.

Finally, you can see that I have been doing a little more weathering on the roof. All chalk here. For the tar paper, I just brushed in a lot more medium gray chalk. I'm also starting to add a few more streaks with white, black, and rust chalks. The second picture shows this pretty well.

[vinceg]

Here's an updated view of the Main Building from the north:



A couple of small things to notice. First, I finished roofing the cupola. Second, I weathered the slate a bit more including a couple of rust streaks coming down from the ridge cap. I see a few shingles coming up on the right side of the building. Need to go back and glue those down. There are also some flecks of chalk dust on the shingles that haven't been brushed around, yet. I will fix that. Also, recall that the dark spot under the cupola is a shadow, not weathering. The light source is behind the diorama.

Notice that the stack is in place for this picture. It's not fastened, yet -- I just wanted to see what it looked like.

I need to finish off the tops of those two brick walls on both sides of the brick extension at the bottom of the picture. Getting tired of seeing that unfinished scene.

[vinceg]

One last pic for now. Here's a close up of the angle between the Main Building and the Middle Building:



You might recall that last time I posted, I wasn't happy about some of the tarpaper lines in this area - sheets from the middle (left) building wrapped to the Main building and ended up angling up the Main Building roof because angle between the roofs. I decided I wanted to fix that (violates Vince Rule 1 - "If you try to keep making small improvements you will eventually make it much worse" - but it bothered me a lot. So, I decided on a single patch in the area. It's the trapezoidal piece on the Main building. The left side is cut at an angle to exactly match the roof line and the other three lines are parallel to the basic roof shape. This patch covers the areas that bothered me....I think it's a bit more believable.

The other thing to point out here is the bottom of the elevator tower. Previous pictures showed a gap here. All sorts of HO scale water pouring into the building. I have another small tarpaper patch here. To be as inconspicuous as possible, I cut the piece from the bottom of a junk mail envelope and then painted it the same tarpaper color. It's thinner paper than the craft paper supplied with the kit and it already has a nice crease ready to go. I got that idea from someone else on this forum but I can't remember who it was. My apologies that I can't cite and thank the source explicitly.

That's it for now - getting to the point where some interesting details get applied - the stack, a dormer on the front of the Main Building, and a variety of other roof stuff. I'll be cleaning up and adding some more weathering along the way. Will post when there's something to look at.

[Mark Dalrymple]

Looking good, Vince.

I think the improvement by getting rid of the angled pieces of tar paper roofing was definitely worth the effort.  The flashing also looks very good.  I've seen Greg Shinnie do some pretty flash flashings in the past - I don't know if that is who you might be thinking of?  His 'Troels Kirk cannery' build thread showed some pretty extensive flashing work.  The flashing 'how to's' start on page 8.

http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=26677&whichpage=8

Cheers, Mark.

[vinceg]

Great reference, Mark, thanks!

I have to admit that I don't take sufficient advantage of the railroad-line.com forums. For some reason, I have a hard time finding things there (search doesn't work well on any of my Mac browsers, e.g.).  Probably just me but the forum software seems a bit wonky to me. So, the direct link is dandy. Thanks again.

[deemery]

You can use Google, DuckDuckGo, etc, to search railroad-line.


Just add "site:railroad-line.com" to the search, and it will limit the search to that site. 


dave