I continued contrustion of the module by clamping the first cross member and screwing it into place.  This is one of the chief advantages of using the L-girder type construction.   It allows cross members to be easily moved if the design of the layout requires it.  I used a countersink bit to pre-drill for each of the screws so that I would not splinter the lumber.

I continued this process for the rest of the crossmbembers, just using equal spacing to start with.  I have not yet figured out a track plan as I am still in the process of building some of the chief industries for this module.  My intention at the moment is to model a meat packing industial siding, showing many of the different parts of the same industy.  My intention is create a small module that would be fun to run a small switching operation on.

Note that I have put some cross bracing in place.  I did not like the way they turned out so I will be be replacing them at some point.  For now they provide the needed support and I will leave them as is until I get further along in the building process.

I decided that it was time a built a module section of a layout at home in order to have a place to display the models I have built so far.  I researched several methods of benchwork construction and decided upon the l-girder construction.  I made this decision for the excellent combination of strength, relativly low cost, and low weight.  I began construction by first gluing and then using screws to attach the boards in a L shape.  This has the effect of creating much of the strength, while at the same time providing a place to screw the crossmember s to.

I screwed the parts of the legs together, not using glue as I intend to make the removable in case I have to move the module.  I then assembled the legs onto the two main joists.  One of the most import things during the assembly process was the use of a square, to make sure that everything lined up correctly.

After the glue had dried on the roof paper I removed the tape and began by touching up all of the roof.  I then dry-brushed several layers of color on the roof panels.  I used two colors of green and then used a dark gray and a light gray which I also used on the gravel portion of the roof.

I then began to cut the various pieces of the roof to the neccesary shape, using hobby cutters to cut them slightly over sized.  I then used a hobby knife and files to fit them in the needed spots.  I used them to cover the edges of the roof panels.  I dry-brushed the colors of the chimney to represent stone.  I intend to paint the trim later.

After I finished installing all of the copper sections of the roof, I painted the top section of the roof using floquil’s roof brown.  As I did not mask the top section when spraying the contact cement, it left a little bit of texture.  My only intent was to save time when masking as it would be covered by the fine ballast.  Once the paint had dried I painted on Woodland Scenic’s Scenic Cement on to the roof.   I then held the model over a small box and sprinkled the fine ballast into the glue.

After knocking off the excess ballast I used a medicine dropper to float extra scenic cement into the areas needed for complete coverage.  I painted the white areas of the roof with a color to match the rest of the copper roofing.

After waiting for the glue to dry I dry-brushed the copper areas of the roof.  I did this by using five different colors, starting with a dark green, then a lighter green, followed by a dark grey for shadows, and then a light grey and a final very light coat of white for the highlights.  The green was only on the copper sections of the roof, the grey highlights continued onto the gravel on the roof.

Once I had completed installing all of the windows, I began work on the roof.  My first step was to use and x-acto knife and trim all of the roof panels so that the seams were fairly straight and smooth.  I found that a slight sawing motion provided the best results.  Do not worry about small divots and such as they will be covered by the copper roofing paper.  Any large gaps I filled with squadron putty (I used a little green, but found that as it was an old tube, it was really hard, so then I switched to the white).

After filing down all of the filled areas and any other rough areas I masked everything  but the roof sections so that I could use contact cement.  As I have mentioned in previous posts I prefer using 3M’s super 77.

After waiting a couple of miniatures I installed the strips for the copper roofing.  I only installed it on the Mansard sections of the roof as per the directions.  At each corner I used a strip of the cardstock to cover each gap.  As you can see I used the Scotch blue painters tape to hold each of the strips into place.

After cleaning all of the castings, using an x-acto knife and a selection of jeweler’s files I primed and painted the window and door castings.  Once the paint had dried I cut the clear plastic to the correct size by using a razor knife and a steel ruler.  I attached them to the window frame by carefully using zap-a-gap.  I have heard of the technique of using white glue to reduce “crazing’ of the clear plastic, but I used a micro brush to spread the glue.  Using this technique I had fairly good results with only a little fog on a couple of windows.

After waiting a short time for the glue on the clear plastic to dry I test fitted and then glued the window frames into place.  The test fit was very important to make sure that each window fit correctly and was square.  The only mistake that I made in doing this was to not fill the larger openings while I was installing the windows.  This left a couple of small gaps which will be very difficult to fill later on, however I think that I should be able to hide them by using “ivy” along some of the windows.

Once I had all of the brick paper glued into place, and the windows and door openings had been cut out, I started working on the roof.   I made sure to test the fit of each piece before gluing it in place using the Elmer’s wood glue.

Going back to cutting out the windows, I found that the easiest way to do this was to stab in the general area of the window with a hobby knife, and carefully cut around the edge of the cardstock.  I also found that using a slight sawing motion had the best results.

For the mansard portion of the roof the overlap on the panels match the placement of the wall panels below.  After gluing all of the mansard sections I glued the top in place, and once it had dried I used a hobby knife and cut top to match the panels as needed.  Installing the tower panels brought about quite a lot of cutting and fitting.  There was one panel with a bit of overlap at the final part, but once I had tapered them  into each other it balanced out.  The top section was very challenging as the pieces did not fit together very well.  I had to make slight adjustments to two of the large pieces, and had to custom cut panels for the D and E sections.  In hind-sight it might have been easier to cut a little bit from each of the other panels to make them fit, however it looks OK.

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Doing the top portion of the roof in this way most likely made the pitch of the upper roof different than the kit, but looking at examples elsewhere it is not an issue.

While the brick paper was drying I used 3M Super 77 Contact Cement to glue a 3′ scale strip of the foundation paper to each wall panel.  After this had dried I first painted the brick a brown color, using a PolyScale paint.

This became a problem later when I attempted to wash the brick with the white paint for the mortar.  Wiping this off ended up taking most of the brown paint with it.

I ended up moving on to installing the rest of the brick paper, but later painted the foundation a gray color later as the brown did not look good with the color of the brick.

I cut the brick paper to the correct height and length.  By carefully measuring I was able to score the back of each angle so that it would lay correctly.  The time spent doing this was well worth the effort as it took form made with cardboard walls and made it impossible to tell once the paper was in place.  I used the 3m contact cement to stick it in place, after I had masked the foundation and insides.

My project over the last couple of days has been to prepare the brick paper.  The first step was to paint each sheet of the brick paper with Floquil Oxide Red.  I used a fairly wide brush, but in the future I think I will use an airbrush as I finally bought an air-compressor.  An airbrush would have made the painting go much quicker and would have given better control over the thickness and coverage of the sheet.

Once this had dried (I waited until the next day, but you could probably do it in a couple of hours) I used a wash of Cermicote off white.  I thinned it with about 3 droppers of water mixed in.  I started by using the wash on only a quarter of the sheet at a time, but by the time I got to the last sheet I would do it in much larger sections without any problems.  Letting the wash dry for only a couple min I used a rag (I used an old t-shirt) and wiped most of it off of the paper.  I varied the directions in which I wiped it so that the wall would develop different patterns to the color of the brick.

After allowing the wash to dry for a couple of hours I sealed it with a quick coat of Testor’s Dullcote.

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.

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