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!