Whilst still not painted, fellow Westerners, I’ve not been totally idle, the preparation in terms of imparting a token wood texture to the styrene formers, laboured masking and a piecemeal priming process due to the vagaries of the weather, taking more time than anticipated.
The ‘front’ of the front:
Simon (
@simond) queried whether I intended to replicate the bow as per the real thing. This was a feature that I wanted to include anyway, so what you see is my half-baked solution. A token nod in the form of the same width styrene section but only in finer half millimetre thickness allowed me to represent random lengths of main beam, one or two set at a jaunty angle with a notch set here n there, was my humble attempt at the real thing. In fairness, the beam - as per the prototype- could have been more pronounced if I’d modelled the two lower sections as well, but mine was custom made to fit the beams on the layout, so that was that. The bonus with the masking is that it hides that ruddy awful canopy glue - or its ruddy awful application to be more precise
The rear of the front:
Perhaps it did look like this
Same use of thinner styrene section as per the front.You’ll notice that in both panels, the holes into which the longitudinal rods will be inserted have been reinstated.
The back panel and architraving which will be affixed to the front after painting/distressing. The right hand side architrave shows my additional attempt at replicating the bowing edifice:
A couple of what it might look like shots when assembled:
This really is a little too flimsy at present; I’m hoping and praying that the roof/ceiling imparts some robustness
The painting is something I’ve been scratching my head over. My original idea for representing the appearance of the front has been shelved. Didn’t work.
The inside and the tops of the internal eaves is not a problem: to save overloading my single brain cell, I’m going to take a short cut and use the new wood look as per my recent Vallejo purchase, as I reckon the exposed wood wouldn’t have been adversely affected by the elements as would the fascia, so that’s that sorted. But the front? The paint kit supplies the required paints / instructions for an ‘old wood’ look, but as arty as it looks, I’m not certain that it’s appropriate in this case. Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot find colour piccies of the train shed, so am relying on ‘stuff’ I’ve seen over the years with other railway buildings at the end of steam. Luckily, I tend to harbour examples of wear n tear as I come across them, so having resorted to them, I’m of a mind that the wood would have looked something like these following examples:
To that end, I popped back to my local model shop and purchased sky, medium and metallic greys from the Tamiya acrylic range, together with a bucketful of their thinners for starters. It could prove yet another bum steer, but I’ve plenty of cheap acrylics, oils, enamels and powders to fall back on if it all goes pear shaped.
Wish me luck!
Jonte