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.
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.
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.
After installing the final section of the dock I cut out and assembled the railings on the cork board. Once these had dried I glued them onto the edge of the dock using Elmer’s wood glue. I then assembled the ramp leading down from the opening in the wall by using the provided scale lumber.
The next step was to fabricate the rest of the ice skid along the length of the dock. Using more scale lumber I cut the pieces to length and glued directly on to the deck. I created stops at either end using scrap pieces. I set the blocks of “ice” on the skid to see how the final look will be. If you look next to the opening in the wall under the cooling tower you will see where I added a ladder for roof access.
About the only thing left on this model is to glue the gravel on to the roof panels, and then weather the entire model, which I most likely won’t do until I place it on a layout or diorama.
