Rugg Manufacturing - SRMW Kit 170

[Jerry]

Vince

That is some excellent modeling.  Weathered just right.  Corners nice and square everything aligned perfectly.

Jerry

[vinceg]

OK, Spoke too soon last time - not quite ready to start working on the roof. First, there is a support member that has to go in to support the roof for what the kit calls the "middle building. Right away I can see that have a problem. On page 4 of this thread, I mentioned that I used a piece of 1/8" square wood, painted concrete, to fill a gap between one of the west foundation walls and the stone retaining wall. I now see that this creates interference with the new support member:



This new member (the chipboard trapezoid facing you) needs to be flush against wall "L" in the picture. Can't get there because of the interference of that hole-blocking piece. The answer, of course, is to chip away the interference. A few minutes with a #17 blade and the interference is removed:



And now it fits:




I could start the roof now, but the instructions call for building the stucco out building. So, I will do that next.

More shortly.....

[vinceg]

OK, the stucco out building. At the beginning of this thread, I mentioned that I started this kit over 10 years ago. The two things I did before the long hiatus were (1) build the basic diorama base (cut foam and glue it to plywood), and (2) paint the castings. Here are the castings as I originally painted them:



I am focusing on the front wall - the side walls are just plain surfaces with a little exposed brick and some windows. Not much to see there that isn't shown on the front wall. I didn't like this wall for a couple of reasons:

• I did a lousy job of painting the door frames and the main door structure pieces (the darker color). Aside from "coloring outside the lines" I think I likely used Polly S paint unthinned and really accentuates the thickness of the wood pieces and looks very out of scale.
• The basic stucco/concrete color looked very green to me. You can't see it well in the picture but it is more apparent in person.

I decided to repaint the doors and frames all white using multiple coats of thinned artists acrylic. I also wanted to try a new color for the concrete. Looking on YouTube, I watched Kathy Millatt's video on painting for concrete. She recommended Using Tamiya Deck Tan as the base color. So, I tried that on one of the side walls and here's the result:



It looked pretty good to me so I did the same thing with the other side wall. I decided not to redo to front wall as I noticed that with some weathering, the contrast is not noticeable. By the way, the back wall of this building is made of wooden planks. More on that shortly.

When assembling the walls, they are first glued together (I used Weldbond for this). Once the glue is set, plaster is used to fill in the cracks. You can also see the doors painted white on the front wall in this shot:



Here's a view after the plaster patch so that you can see the difference in colors between original and the new Tamiya paint:



Finally here's the left side wall after painting and weathering:

[vinceg]

The above pictures focus on the left side wall of the stucco building (as you look at the front of the building). I did the same thing on the right side wall. However, when applying the chalk weathering, I was careless about making sure that everything streaked vertically. I decided the solution would be to use a little alcohol (straight, no ink.... no chaser, either for you Thelonious Monk fans out there) to fix the streaks. To my surprise, the alcohol started wearing away the new Tamiya top coat. Here's the result:



I decided I liked the effect so I left it alone. Turns out this side will be invisible as the diorama will be situated on the layout, but that was not a factor.

The accidental chipping is on the right side of the wall. I'm definitely going to have to keep this in mind for future projects. Not sure if it will still work if the Tamiya paint cures for a very long time. Obviously the Polly S that is underneath didn't wear away.

[vinceg]

As I mentioned, the back wall of the stucco building is made of wood. The kit comes with a chipboard template to use as a former. I cut it out and drew lines on it with a square to help guide my board placement. They are not there to locate specific boards; rather, they are there to give me a reference for vertical alignment.



Look above the wall to where the side walls meet the chipboard former. You will see that they are taller than the template. Worse yet, the one on the left is taller than the one on the right. This should have caught my attention -- but didn't. That means more work ahead as you'll see.

For the individual wood planks, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at "Getting my Sierra West on." That is, try the techniques that Brett Gallant demonstrates with his videos. The instructions call for 12 pieces of strip wood. I decided to do 4 pieces with black and brown chalk (dissolved in alcohol), 4 pieces slightly more brown, and 4 pieces with inkahol. I wanted to generate some variation between the planks. Variation is good, right? (anybody laughing, yet?) Here are the 12 pieces:



And here is the wall with the planks installed:



Looked OK, I think, but to my eye had too much variation. Too much zebra effect. I eventually decided to tone it down a bit with some black chalk.

More shortly.

[vinceg]

Earlier we saw that the left and right side walls of the stucco building appeared to be at different heights. I verified this by cutting out the chipboard roof and placing it on top. Here's the view:



This matches what we saw before - the left side is higher than the right side. I used a heavy file to scrape away hydrocal until the left wall (as you look at the building from the back) was the same height as the right wall. That makes it level but  it still didn't fix the problem that both walls were noticeably higher than the chipboard former. I decided that it would be too much work and too risky to try to continue to file off hydrocal to make it fit and decided instead to use a piece of trim at the top to cover the gap.

One more thing. The kit doesn't seem to address how the back wall (wooden) interfaces with the side stucco walls. Having the wood wall just end and seeing the chipboard and wood layers exposed didn't seem desirable. Instead, I decided to shorten the width of the wood wall just a bit and use end posts just as you would normally use at the corner of two clapboard walls. The problem is that the usual 1/16" square post wood isn't thick enough to terminate the wall with both the chipboard and wood thicknesses. However, 3/32" square is. So, that's what I did. Here's a pic of the back wall with both the corner posts and top trip in place:



If you noticed that there are no wood planks under the door, you are correct. My intent is to have a stoop of some sort there so I didn't bother filling that in.

Sorry about the angle - the glare is a little bad here, but I think the idea comes across. You can also see that the roof is glued on as well at this point.

As I looked at this, I still wasn't happy about the wide variation in wood panels so I did a little more weathering after applying the tarpaper roof. Final pics in the next post.

[vinceg]

Here's the back wall after toning down the wood with some black chalk and adding some dirt/dust near ground level:



You can see that the wood trim is applied to the eave as well.

Here's an angled shot showing the finished roof. Remember that the front wall is its original color whereas the side wall here is Tamiya Deck Tan. They look very compatible to me.



Here's a more frontal shot showing all the doors and trim painted white.



And finally a closeup of the two side walls:





After taking these pictures I did weather the roof a bit more -- mostly dusting with some light gray chalk to tone down the black a bit more. I won't post any explicit pictures of that. I expect we'll catch a view of that in some of the later pictures.

Now, I AM ready to start the roof on the main complex. In fact, As I am typing this, there is some work done. I will try to post a little more tonight if I can. But, I've said that before....

[vinceg]

OK, starting on the roof work. As I started to glue down chipboard, I noticed a few things that needed some thought (at least for me). One is the tall smoke stack extension that sits on top of the hydrocal chimney casting. The chimney casting is less than half the width of the stack. Not necessarily a problem - I'm sure it would hold just fine with a good adhesive, but it seemed as though I would have to be careful about holding the stack in place while the glue dried. Something I've demonstrated that I'm not great at. I decided to glue in a small block of wood to make the resting place more secure. Here's a pic:



You can see that I am holding the stack above its final resting place. You can see the original hydrocal chimney top just below it - it's the part with the red primer overspray. You can also see the block of wood I glued next to it. The glue hasn't even finished drying, yet.

Here it is with stack in place. It's just sitting loosely on top. Also needs to be painted, of course.



Looks a little crooked in the picture. I will work on that when I do the final placement.

More in a moment...

[vinceg]

Here was another issue. Check out this picture:



The building in the center-left of the picture (see the gables and the wall I labeled "Y" on the inside) is the freight building. If you follow the roof line down on the right side, you can see that it will hit the existing piece of chipboard about 1/2" toward the camera. It occured to me that this angle would then expose a little triangular view under the roof to the freight building wall. But, there is no freight building wall. So, I made one. You see a little piece of chipboard there (again, wet glue). That is meant to represent the wall. I ended up pulling out this piece of chipboard because I recognized that I was missing the green corner post to the left of the adjacent building (glad the glue was still wet). The new piece was painted white and inserted properly. You'll see the result shortly.

I suppose another solution would have been to just run tar paper down to the other roof to cover that gap. But, with that window so close, I felt that might not look right.

[vinceg]

One more thing to do. See the following picture:



The building to the left is the Main Building, the building to the right is the Middle Building. The roof over the middle building does not end at the point where the wall abuts the main building. Rather, the apex of the roof extends all the way to the main building. To support that extension, the kit includes a triangular chipboard piece. You can see it glued in here. I also glued a piece of 1/8" square basswood along the base on the other side to make it stronger. From the picture, you can see that the top of that triangle continues the peak line of the roof from the left. But there is a gap to the right of the triangle. I am not sure if that is designed that way or if my construction was WAY off. Probably the latter. In any event, when test fitting the roof, I noticed that I could look up under the roof and see this gap. This side of the diorama will actually be facing away from the aisle so it shouldn't be visible but it still bugged me. I solved the problem with another piece of 1/8" square wood painted white. The wood is on the viewing side (camera side) as we're looking at it). Looks like a support beam of sorts. Believable, I think. I did not take a separate picture of that. Maybe I will take an angle to see it in a future shot.

OK. So right about now, I'm realizing that this kit is quite a stretch for me. I still think it will look good but there are many little issues that I assume are caused by my relative inexperience in building complex kits. You become an experienced pilot by studying and doing a lot of hopefully-not-fatal stupid things that you learn from. I reckon the same holds true for modeling. Need to do a lot of stuff wrong but not so wrong that it ruins the kit.

Enough philosophy - next post will show some shots of where the kit stands and the end of Sunday.

[vinceg]

Sunday was a good day. Lots of work done. Here's where I'm at. A pic from the northeast:




The stack is still not glued in. It's painted and I added a little chalk, but not finished. Need lots of black soot near the top. I was happy to see that the transition between the hydrocal chimney and the resin stack isn't too bad, color-wise.

From the southeast:



From the southwest



If you look closely under the freight building roof, you can see that little piece of wall (painted chipboard) that I discussed a couple of notes ago. You can also see that the roof isn't quite level - it slopes up a bit as you move away from the door. I was careful to use a level when setting up the supports for that roof. I think the better approach would have been to cut out the roof and test with that since how the scored chipboard folds and sits on the support can cause some variation. I'm not too worried about it. The instructions actually suggest that the tar paper run all the way to the flat roof. I think this won't be very noticeable.

Finally, a view from the northwest:



If you look under that middle roof extension I mentioned earlier, you can see the gap-filling post I mentioned. Also, the chipboard from the main building doesn't reach all the way to the middle building. I'll have to clean that up a bit.

That's it for now. I have to finish a couple of roofs on the north side, add a coupla cupolas, and then trim the eaves. I'll report back when I can.

[vinceg]

By the way, thanks to everyone for the supportive comments. I should have acknowledged earlier but was heads down try to dig out of my picture backlog. Sorry.

Also, if anyone is wondering where the stucco building is, I set it aside for the moment. I haven't yet decided how to work it into the scene so it is sitting elsewhere on the bench.

[PRR Modeler]

Excellent modeling and trouble shooting.

[Mark Dalrymple]

Coming on nicely, Vince.

Cheers, Mark.

[postalkarl]

Hey Vince:

Progress looks just great.

Karl