Bar Mills Queen City Coal

[vinceg]

I filled the corner gaps with spackle. I like that pink stuff that turns white when it's dry. (Yes, I find that fun....dang those marketing guys).



Another shot of the front. Not so obvious from the shot is that I also spackled the wood trim along the top of the wall as well.



More shortly.

[vinceg]

This building has two additions. One is a small addition immediately behind the main structure and is two stories tall. The other is a much larger one that is single story and has a footprint just about as large as the main building. First, the small addition. It is a three-wall addition that connects to the main building via four tabs:



And a couple of pics of the addition completely installed





More shortly.

[jerryrbeach]

Vince,


I have been following and have a couple thoughts.  First, you mentioned the sign shouldn't look that worn on a wall that looks pristine. IMO the wall is not pristine.  If it was there would be no bricks showing where the stucco has eroded away.  Following up on that, once the walls are weathered I think the sign will look fine. 


I have never modeled stucco, and probably never will because the era and location I model lack those types of structures.  So, take this with a grain of salt...  I think that you might want to try using chalks to weather the wall.  That would allow you to add darker patches under the windows, water stains, etc., more easily than trying to manipulate a wash. 

[deemery]

I'd "split the difference" - take Jerry's idea to use chalks/pastels/pigments underneath windows, etc, then use a wash to blend everything together. 


dave

[vinceg]

Now for the big addition. This post will bore most people as I think everyone else already knew this decades ago but it was here that I finally had a huge DUH moment. This kit, more than others, I have found that I am constantly having to trim wood bracing to get things to fit properly. Probably obvious to y'all but I finally understood it here. When you build a clapboard structure, you have two perpendicular walls that don't actually butt up against each other. They both (usually) get glued to a support brace with each wall's end lining up with the the end of the square brace (1/8", or thereabouts). That little L-shaped "hole" that is left is then filled in with the 1/16" corner piece. Simple. No ambiguity. But, with a stucco building, there is no corner piece. The walls butt up against each other so that you have a clean corner after gluing. When I cut horizontal bracing, I usually cut it pretty close to  the edge of the piece less the width of the support piece. That's wrong here. Needs to be less the width of the support brace and also the width of the perpendicular wall piece. Again, obvious. Now (to me).

So, what about ambiguity? Well, when you butt the two walls together you have to decide which wall will be longer. That is, one wall will effectively end up being longer by the width of the perpendicular wall.

Here are the first two walls being joined:



The wall with the door opening is a side wall and the wall with the two small windows is the back wall. You can see here that I have made the side wall "longer" because I put glue on the edge of the side wall to attach it to the back of the back wall (rather than attach glue to the left side of the back wall to glue it to the back of the side wall (....the chalice from the palace.... anybody get the reference?)). The reason I did this is because the bracing diagram for the side wall calls for putting the support brace at the very edge of the side wall so there is no other way to do it unless you notch out the brace after it's glued in to make room for the back wall to attach the other way. And since the small addition worked in exactly the same way, I didn't think twice about it. (Actually, I might have also considered using a corner piece here -- more on that later.)

After gluing on the other side wall, I'm able to do this test fit:



On both sides, the back wall is extending the the length of the side walls. It doesn't look that way from this overhead shot but that is because the back wall is shorter (height) than the side walls so there is a bit of an illusion there.

More shortly.

[vinceg]

So as part of the test fit I put in the roof chipboard. Surprise. The roof is too wide. Turns out the chipboard is exactly as wide as the back wall. That means I should have put the bracing on that wall and glued it to the back of the side walls. That would make the overall back wall longer by two times the width of the task board. Also, and now not surprisingly, the roof is too short. The side walls are too long and the design calls for some roof overhang so the rain runoff falls at least a little bit away from the building. Had I checked the roof fit early on, I would have recognized that the bracing diagram wasn't going to get me where I needed to be and I could have adjusted.

Of course, this isn't a big deal. It was easy enough to trim off some of the chipboard to make it fit. As it turns out, that piece of chipboard being cut off serves nicely to extend the length so I edge-glued it. Here's a pic:



Good to go for this problem. After working through this, I wondered whether I actually should have used a corner piece. Turns out that the task board is pretty close to 1/16" thick. Not quite, but close. In retrospect, I don't think that was the plan. First, the roof would still be too short - the back wall would be in exactly the same place it is now. Second, I would have had to not only sand the corner piece to make it flush with the task board but then also have two seams to fill/hide. I am happy with the way this turned out. Of course, doing it right would have been even happier.

By the way, I will cut those little "wings" off the roof extension I glued on. That is just the original length of the piece I trimmed off the side.

On to the next problem. More shortly.

[vinceg]

For this next surprise look again at the test fit for the big addition:



You can see the addition is wider than the main building. That's on purpose. I think it adds some nice architectural interest to the structure. But, look at the upper right where the addition mates up with the main building. There is a small piece of task board there that terminates the right wide wall. That piece is glued to the back of the main building. And, the left and right side walls are exactly the same length. So, that means there is a gap on the left side. Here's a pic:



I didn't notice anything in the instructions on how to deal with this. Could just skew the building a bit -- after all, it's less than 1/16". Or, I could spackle it -- that would let me play with the pink stuff some more (yay). Rather than hide it, I decided to feature it. I put a piece of scale 4x12 in there to make a clear line between the two buildings. Here's a pic.



More shortly.

[vinceg]

One more thing to resolve. If you recall from earlier in the thread, The walls on the main building will be doubled in thickness. That is, a second piece of task board will be glued to the main wall above the roof. That will make the wall thick enough to support the ceramic capping that will be applied on top. The same thing applies to the large addition. A second piece of task board will be glued inside the each of the two side walls. That means that the left side wall cannot be glued directly to the small, two story addition. Rather, we need to have it spaced out by one task board thickness so that everything works out.

This is an easy problem to solve, of course, I cut a piece of scrap task board from the wall sheets and glued it to the small addition where the large addition will be glued. Here's a pic:



This will leave exactly enough room for the piece that will be inserted inside the outer wall.

More shortly.

[vinceg]

We're caught up at this point. The shell is more or less complete, sans roofs and external gantry crane. Here are a few pics Again, the roof chip board is not glued down. It is there for visualization only. There are still some spots missing some paint at this point. I will post those updates later. This shot of from the back:



Quartering shot from the front. I like the way the 4x12 gap filler worked out.



Another shot toward the back. You can see that I didn't do a good enough job of sanding the spackle. A couple more coats of paint will fix that I think. Not sure how much effort I will put into it as this will not be visible from the aisle.



And finally from the back. BTW, those two rectangular holes are where skylights will go.



That's it for now. Not sure where I will go next - detailing walls or doing the roofs. I think the roofs. That big addition in particular is not very sturdy because there is no diagonal bracing. The roof will fix that.

Talk to you soon.

[vinceg]

Vince,


I have been following and have a couple thoughts.  First, you mentioned the sign shouldn't look that worn on a wall that looks pristine. IMO the wall is not pristine.  If it was there would be no bricks showing where the stucco has eroded away.  Following up on that, once the walls are weathered I think the sign will look fine. 


I have never modeled stucco, and probably never will because the era and location I model lack those types of structures.  So, take this with a grain of salt...  I think that you might want to try using chalks to weather the wall.  That would allow you to add darker patches under the windows, water stains, etc., more easily than trying to manipulate a wash.

Really good point, Jerry. It's hard to make the case for "pristine" when there are bricks showing. As it sits now, the paint is mostly very clean and that looks out of place with respect to the bricks and the sign. As you said, it needs some weathering which I do intend to do. I was expecting to use chalks almost exclusively. I do like using washes but in the few test patches I tried here, it seems too dark to me -- even with a one tablespoon mix or Hunterline Light Gray. We'll see.

[vinceg]

I'd "split the difference" - take Jerry's idea to use chalks/pastels/pigments underneath windows, etc, then use a wash to blend everything together. 


dave

I do like the nice overall "dull" the washes can provide but I haven't yet found a wash that isn't too overpowering. I'll keep trying, tho. Maybe the answer is to use a lot of chalks and the wash would then just be straight alcohol that blend the already applied chalks? Need more experiments.

thx.

[Mark Dalrymple]

Coming on great, Vince!

You've made some nice fixes in this installment, however I'm somewhat surprised that there isn't an exploded diagram somewhere in the instructions showing how the walls fit together.  This seems to me to be a MAJOR omission.

Cheers, Mark.

[PRR Modeler]

Excellent modeling Vince.

[vinceg]

Thanks Mark and Curt. I agree, Mark, there should be a few hints as to how those items fit. Toward the end of the instructions, they do have exploded views showing the parts but in general they omit the bracing and show overall location, not the detailed relative fit. I like it, actually. It seems to be most of what an experienced modeler should need. But, I'm pretty sure the bracing diagrams are incorrect here, too (I noted another error earlier on in this thread). Still, had I been more careful with test fitting, I should have been able to work it out. I will go back and pore over the pages to see if I missed something. Would be good to know if I had been careless in reading the instructions.

[vinceg]

One last post before I hit the hay. I wanted to get a little taste of what the final product will look like so I wanted to at least place the roof on the large addition. Bar Mills gives you laser-cut, self-stick roofing paper. I wanted to try to get a look that is a little closer to what Jack Ellis did with the model in the photos. Spoiler alert - not so much. But, I did try something different. To treat the paper, I started by painting with Rustoleum rattle can light gray primer. I then tried taking a page out of Zephyr Jeff's book by spattering on other colors with other rattle cans - in particular, black, darker gray, white, Khaki. Then, while the paper was still on the sheet, I used a Q-Tip to rub some black charcoal on the edges of the tar paper. Here's what it looked like before application:



I then glued it down to the building and did some dry brushing of white along with some streaking with a few pastels. Then, I glued in those pieced that make the side walls 2X thicker. This is where the ceramic caps attach. Finally, I placed the skylights on top. Here are a couple of picks to wrap up the weekend. The skylights and ceramic caps are not glued down -- they're just there for a quick peek into the future. Other than the roof, nothing is weathered. Lots more work to come.





I forgot to glue some black construction paper under the skylights. I can still do that later, if needed, There's no floor there as there is in the main building.

Nighty-night.