After a "loooong" hiatus I'm back in the train loft and starting to improve that which needs improvement!

My real interest being scenery, I'm afraid I didn't spend enough time and effort learning to lay track and it all went horribly wrong from an operational point of view. That meant that operation was basically limited to running around in a circle. The depot and yards were scenic but effectively out of bounds to operation.

Anyway "some time has passed" (Covid, hip operation etc) and its now time to put the layout right.  So I dived (dove?) in and removed a lot of structures (the Olson's plant was a blighter to extract without damage), excised the offending trackwork and started sourcing some new HOn3 switches, which are now hard to find in the UK. Peco seem to have stopped making them.

I'm now working on removing a large part of the baseboard in the depot area and replacing it.  I'm planning on laying the replacement, redesigned trackage for the yard off the layout for convenience with wiring and installing switch machines and testing! 

I had more issues with the plastcised American backscene not sticking to the wall so I trimmed off the sky part and will redo that too. Ho hum!  Then I will rebuild Cuspidor's finest transport interchange................

 Wish me luck.

Judy's Drilling Co

 My scratchbuilt version of the Builders in Scale Weiry and Sons Drilling. Built circa 1980

Super-detailing an old Pola Blacksmith's Barn kit - 4

Almost done

Pretty well landscaped now just needs lighting.

Outhouse (occupied!), Ash pit and slag heap. A few flowers and the Ceanothus in bloom.

Super-detailing an old Pola Blacksmith's Barn kit - 3

Some more detailing

 Before anyone says the floor is a hazard, all the pictures I've researched on old foundries show most stuff is on the floor.....

Cupboard and shelves. The cupboard doors are just pencilled on but look pretty good in the photo.

Coal shed , ash pit and water tower added. Spud Tamson is now in place eternally shovelling coal......

More internal details

Casting moulds (upturned TV set castings from an old Corgi (UK) interior set I've had for years), scrap clutter pile and casting sand pit added. The sandpit will have a roof soon.

Super-detailing an old Pola Blacksmith's Barn kit - 2

I've been working on the machinery for the foundry and other internal details.  I plan to add led fire to both heat sources.

The smithing hearth. Once glued together, needing four hands, I wrapped styrene re-inforcing bands around the chimney and painted with red primer. The coal pile has been drilled to allow red light through.

I painted the bricks to represent blue engineering brick, the picture is a bit vague.

I made two crucibles for the furnace from the rounded ends of some thick sprue. I hollowed them out. One is fitted with a handle, the other is a "spare".

Painted and suitably clagged up with slag (Bi-carb)

Hearth and the start of a steamhammer from plastic scraps.

Steamhammer nearing completion.

A tiny hook to carry the crucible to the furnace.

The interior - so far.

Board and batten siding

A neighbour who sculpts wargaming figures gave me a load of Evergreen styrene shapes recently and luckily there were some 1/2mm strips just the right size for the battens.  Fitting them retrospectively was tedious and fiddly but worth the end result.

The detrained loco will provide steam to power the foundry machines.

Through the looking glass.

Super-detailing an old Pola Blacksmith's Barn kit

The kit 

I bought this kit on Ebay for the opening price of just £1.50. The postage cost twice as much! Made in Germany by Pola it was branded Tyco, AHM also marketed this kit as their own. I find that there isn't a great demand for these old plastic kits over here so a bargain can be found now and then. I should think it's about thirty years old but in top condition.  The casting quality on these kits is always good, although there are numerous ejector stud marks to deal with. The styrene is quite fibrous and needs a bit of work to get a clean surface when removing thickness on parts.  The one glaring fault is the gap between the wavy edge cladding boards, it's been bugging me and I've just had a barinwave (typo) or is that a Barry brainwave? I will add wood or plastic strips to make it board and batten and cover the toylike gaps.

The trickiest part of construction is joining the four walls, they are simply chamfered 45 degrees with no locator pins so must be positioned carefully.  My go-to styrene cement is Plastic Magic as it doesn't mar the surface or paint due to its fast evaporation.  I had to resort to a MEK type solvent as the PM didn't bond too well with this plastic. I have also used ACC on some joints.  I saw this as a potential small metal foundry/ironworks to service the mines around Cuspidor so set to.

I discarded the base, saving the planked area for other projects.

The Build

I decided to go the whole hog and detail the interior. As the roof is so low and the only viewpoint would be from the front doors I started by sanding the insides of the main walls, then I scribed them to roughly match the size of the external board detail.  

A brush with acrylic grey/tan

Next came the exterior walls. I sprayed them with rattle can red primer and roughly drybrushed some white acrylic over for starters.

Sorry but I've been doing this while down with the worst cold/cough illness I've had in years and lost the will to stop working to photograph progress. Basically it entailed assembling the walls, fitting a new floor with Evergreen sidewalk  sheet as I can't see a foundry with wooden floors and figuring out what to do next.  I removed the rear shed/extension (outlined on the above pic) as I wanted to create a largeish furnace at the back. There is a small, brick blacksmith's hearth that comes with the kit which I will install too with LED flames. I assembled three stone walls from old plaster wall castings I'd made a while back, covered it with plaster brick and added a resin chimney, which I built plaster stone around.  I kept the piece hollow and painted it black. I'm thinking of adding LED flames here as well.

Carving to be done.

Next I cut out a hole in the rear wall where the furnace will live and made a front wall from stone to go inside.

Firewall glued in.

A bit of painting later and the addition of a support tie around the furnace and it will be ready to be attached when the time comes.

Support girder with ties and an access door that needs blackening made from the hanging sign that came with the kit. It needs a lock too.

Next I had to come up with some sort of mechanism to deal with moving the hot metal from the furnace so with a bit of grinding and some plastic girder, here is my Heath-Robinson tackle.  I have much more to work out and the possibilities for detail are good .  As my knowledge of founding is scant, this is how we do it in Cuspidor!

Backscene woes

After two tries with purchasing and fitting rather expensive vinyl backscenes from a US producer, one with self adhesive and one without, I finally ripped the damned thing off the wall and binned it.  The second version was laid on new, flat hardboard and rolled perfectly flat. The result was incurable bubbling yet again.  I am looking at an inexpensive, plain sky scene to replace it but the deepest I can find is only 15" and the backdrop is 24".  Oh well....