I continued the construction of Dorothy’s house, using the Micro-Mark magnetic gluing jig to hold the bottom of the walls while they were being glued. At the top of the walls I used the the blue painter’s tape to hold the walls until the glue dried. I found that using Elmer’s wood glue works very well on the cardstock walls, and that you usually only need to hold it into place for a couple of minutes.
After getting the walls glued to the top and bottom floors I waited for them to cure and then added the interior floors, making sure to line them up with the wallpaper on the inside. I found that the magnets for the jig happened to be the correct height to hold the first floor at the correct level while it dried. The floors are made by using the embossed sheet, which I glued to the cardstock using the 3M contact cement. I then painted them using PolyScale roof brown, as I think it matched the color of that type of floor quite well.
After painting the area between the first floor and the sub floor a dark color I glued the remaining walls in place. I did not glue the back wall on as I am considering putting an interior in this house. Here is the picture of the building with all of the walls in place:
The next step will be to paint and install the brick paper.
As a Christmas present my wife gave a the Scale Structures Limited model, Dorothy’s House. This is a cardstock and cast metal craftsman model of a brick house with all of the fancy “gingerbread” decorations.
Upon first opening the box it was slightly intimidating to see the sheer amount of parts, which were separated into different bags.
I read the instructions completely and then dove into the kit. The first step was to indentify the walls and floors and cut them from the rest of the cardstock parts. I then used 3M contact cement to glue the “wallpaper” onto the inside of the walls:
In the picture you can see the large amount of parts in their respective bags. Also you can see how I turned the pieces right side up so that I could trim the wallpaper to fit the panels.
Once I had put the wallpaper on all of the walls I was able to start construction. I used the the magnetic jig from Micro-Mark to assist in building the walls. By using waxpaper in the jig I was able to easily remove the model once the glue had dried. Per the suggestions in the manual I did not glue the back wall (the large one) in place as I want to be able to remove it to add furniture and people at a later date.
For glueing the walls to the floor panels and each other I used Elmer’s Wood Glue. The 3M blue painters tape was very helpful in holding the various wall panels together while drying.
In the next post I will show how I completed the remaining wall panels and installed the floors.
Before completing the chalk weathering on the model I painted the metal parts with silver paint. Over this I dry-brushed a rust color, adding heavy color where it would be likely for rust to form. Once this had dried I used the chalk to blend in the areas and add even more rust color to the metal.
One of the other final steps was to fill in the small gap on the upper window by using white glue. This had the effect of filling in the gap, but was able to be hidden by the weathering so that it was not noticeable. Once all of this had dried I coated the entire model with Dullcote to protect all of the weathering. On most models I would have done this before installing the windows as it take away the clarity, however in this case I wanted the windows to be slightly opaque so that you were not able to see inside the building.
Once this building was complete I donated it to the San Leandro Historic Railway society to be used as a generic industrial building on our layout. This building served as my “try piece” and landed me the job of working with another member to create the buildings for the Selby area of the layout (Selby, CA during the 1950’s contained a lead smelter and not far from there is the C&H sugar plant). I will provide pictures of this current building and any future buildings in that area as they are built.
