Dave's corner

[Frederic Testard]

Thank you, Darryl.

Let's start the building of the shed. A cardboard core, black side out, white side in, covered with some canson paper chosen because it looked more like wood than the other colors I had. I should have used white and AandIed it as I did on the ship which I'll show later. Well, here I simply painted it with acrylic colors, and decided that, even if it was really not extraordinary, seen through dirty windows with no lights inside it wouldn't be so bad.



The doors and windows frames were pre-glued. 2mm x 4mm basswood strips. Thickness was computed taking into account that of the outside clapboard siding walls.





A first attempt at decorating the temporary assembled two first unfinished sides of the building.



When came the time to make the left side window, I wondered if I could use something available in my various part boxes. Despite a total lack of prevision, luck was with me and the hole happened to have nearly the right size for one of my lasercut S scale windows by Rusry Stumps. Considering I had been blessed by fate, I made the window functionnal as a sort of thanksgiving, as the two pics below show.





The second side involved less luck and less tiredness...



After adding the roof (removable in the unlikely case Troels would wish to light my ugly inside walls) and a few new decorating attempts...



Finally, a few pictures shot on location, with a more serious decorating work.





This last pic was shot as a way to remind an arrangement of details that pleased me.



And again on location, after scenicing the place (the glue was still wet when I shot these pictures).

[chester]

Excellent results on the shed Frederic (par for your work) The new ramp angle is much more desirable as well. I see many here on our coast that are even less of an incline, but yours would be just right for a deep water frontage.

[Ray Dunakin]

Love the shed -- both the prototype and the model.

[finescalerr]

Lots of character. -- Russ

[Wesleybeks]

Good to come across here and see this thread Frederic.

As always its a pleasure to see your work

[Junior]

Frédéric, very charming and well executed shed. That last picture is really great.

Anders

[Scratchman]

Nice work Frederic. -- looking forward to seeing it come together.

Gordon Birrell

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77318580@N00/

[Frederic Testard]

Thanks to all of you for the kind comments.

After working a little on the donkey engine for the hoisting shed, I decided, following Marc's advice, I would build, later, a smaller model. And launched the main subproject of the scene, the main building on the right.

Again, everything was built using a cardboard core. But since we want to be able to look inside, I used more wood.

In order to make temporary assemblies easier, I devised a tabs system that helps maintaining the walls together like a sort of 3D puzzle. The two pictures below show how it works.





Then I worked on the look of the walls. The inside was weathered, the outside shingling was done using Rusty Stumps S scale lasercut shingles, and then the outside was weathered too.





Then the boards were made. I scanned a piece of wood to get the right background, wrote the text and printed the sign over some very thin paper. It's very close to a method invented by Karl A. (UKGuy).





The support for the big sliding door...



and the door (still unfinished then)...



And the building in location (but with nothing glued).





A last sign, simply made using Woodland Scenics dry transfers.

[Frederic Testard]

Starting the interior of the main building. This bench was the first piece I built to populate the inside of the building. The working drawer is an easy detail.



These benches swallow the goodies much faster than we do them... Progress in my 3D thinking...





While I was pondering about what to put where, I built the next part, a more involved one, a table saw. It is mainly made of styrene and its size is about 0.8" long, 0.6" wide and high.







With the motor :







I've found the inspiration for the model on this site :
http://owwm.com/photoindex/bytype.aspx
I chose "table saw" and got a immense list of saws. Searching only the older ones with a wooden frame, I finally came upon this one :
http://owwm.com/photoindex/detail.aspx?id=854
which became my model. The motor installation was inspired from this one :
http://owwm.com/photoindex/detail.aspx?ID=1524

Below are a number of shots taken during the construction and detailing the whole process.

I often use my Chopper II to hold parts that are to be glued, be these parts wood or plastic. The chopper provides good right angles and can hold firmly parts or sticks holding parts.
In the first pic, the vertical frame of the saw is being glued. The pic shows the glueing of the second vertical post, the horizontal one was also glued there, using another identically sized part to define the distance between the bottom of the post and the location of the horizontal member.



In the two last pics, I show how I cut the third vertical post by pushing the partial frame against the saw, inserting the post to be cut against the horizontal member and cutting it flush with the top of the frame. In spite of the slightly untrue cuts due to the shape of the blade, the way the MEK welds parts allows some very good alignment of parts afterwards.





The next shots show the blade raising mechanism before it's final glueing.

First two angles were lengthened and glued to two of the vertical posts. In order to have a good height alignment, a drill was inserted in the predrilled holes to show if they aligned well.



Then the arms were made by laminating several strips of styrene and filing them until their shape was good. When I compared the photos of this assembly to those of the model, I found it looked very coarse, so I filed the parts even more, until they had a reasonably thin look.





Next came the motor. It's mainly done with two concentric styrene tubes, and a 0.04" rod inserted into the smaller tube, plus an additionnal short length of tube for the pulley. The cast frame around the housing is made of HO 1"x2" strips of styrene.

The frame is made of 0.06" angle and 0.02" thick plain sheets. A few NBWs heads complete the detailing. In the penultimate picture, the belt is about to be glued (ACC). It is made of a narrow strip cut into a commercial envelope.

Finally the last shot shows the completed model. The table was also made of styrene, with grooves made with a scriber. The guides are straightforward assemblies of bits of strips and sheets, plus a few tiny parts of rod to simulate the controls. The table was painted with Humbrol Aluminium. The belt weathering was made using the bottom of the bottle where I clean my brushes (in this case, the brush cleaned the bottle), and I used this trick to complete the weathering of the engine. The rust is very thin Polly Scale Boxcar Red. The base colour is Grimy Black, and some Oily Black was also added in the neighboorhood of moving parts.

[finescalerr]

You could have done a diorama with just the table saw. Beautiful. -- Russ

[Frederic Testard]

Thanks, Russ, I loved building this model. It took some time, something like 6 or 7 hours probably. The drying time of the MEK is a part of it, but not so much since it evaporates reasonably fast, and although not really dry the joint is generally strong enough to continue the work. One point worth being noted is I rarely tackle this kind of complex work without a serious preliminary thinking of the whole project. In the case of the saw, I had no surprise - except that the parts look a bit heavy, which I tried to correct by filing - since all this 'design in the mind' proved to work. Sometimes, you have to change your method because it won't work, or simply because something easier will work as well.

Then, it was time to think to a drill press. In the small space available, I opted for this small machine (found on the same site as the table saw) :



which was apparently manufactured in the 30s and would fit Troels' era.

The shape of the frame was obtained by first having a piece of 1/16" styrene rod boil and then bending it. Since it didn't really want to hold its shape, I used a lighter to reheat it and obtained the desired shape.
The drill shown below (yet unfinished) required some interesting cross drilling, in particular making a 1.1mm diameter hole in the 1.6 mm (=1/16") bent piece. With a lot of delicacy, it worked reasonably.
The shown model still needed a lot of filing, which was done with a very light hand since some assemblies were quite fragile. It still lacked the motor, belting and a few details, plus clearly paint.

Cross-drilling.





Some lateral filing on pieces of tube.



The partly assembled drill press.





More progress. The extreme close-up reveals some accuracy drawbacks that were again corrected by a little bit of filing when the MEK was totally dry and the bond solid, and also simply by the fact that the model is much smaller than that...







It was difficult to paint the tiny thing in such a way it looked nice in extreme close-ups, even if it looked fine to my (glassed) eyes. With a lot of filing (the last step with simple canson drawing paper which has a little sanding power), I finally got something I considered reasonable. The shot shows some inaccuracies in the pulley area, but it was concealed later when I installed the belt and put everything on a workbench.





Here is the drill on a second workbench (only after shooting the pic did I notice the central support was a bit twisted, which was corrected later by regluing it). The table saw is on the other side.

[finescalerr]

Insane. -- Russ

[Ray Dunakin]

Wow, pretty nice work for something so small.

[Frederic Testard]

Thanks, Russ and Ray. Sometimes, I just love being insane.

The next 'big' piece was a materials rack. With the help of a simple jig and a bit of patience it worked relatively easily.

The jig.



One side of the materials rack in the jig and the second one already assembled.



The finished part in the right foreground.



The detailing process was relatively long and spread on several weeks.

A belt was added so as the drill could operate, plus a vice and a few hand tools. A few planks on the rack added some interest to it.





More shelves, some tools and other goodies on the benches, two boards on a wall.





Among other little things (in particular nude girls that had been asked for for quite a while...), I then showed a bare metal rudder which prompted Troels to suggest a bigger model more conformal to what a real rudder would be



So he showed several of his own paintings, and in particular this one.



which inspired me to make this. The piece is 5 scale feet long, it was made out of styrene and painted with Polly Scale acrylics (boxcar red and depot olive).



A few details were still to be finished when I made this picture (mainly the direction and blotch of white on the metal axis in the middle).

[finescalerr]

Most satisfactory in every aspect. -- Russ