04-24-2011, 03:34 PM
The time has come to begin assembling the house proper.
I welded the first two walls together the other night, just be fore calling it “a day and a night and there will be time to do more tomorrow.” I should have known better than to do such a thing when I was tired!
I awoke the next morning to discover the two walls were misaligned by 0.020” … maybe acceptable to some, but not to me, especially going after an NMRA Merit Award with this one! It’s an easy fix, though … just decide which will be “correct" and weld a 0.020” strip on the other one …
A little trimming of the excess and then filing of the opposite wall and all is copasetic, albeit an hour’s time has been wasted!
Now to weld on the second wall … more carefully this time. Notice that I have scribed a line in the “receiving” wall the thickness of the wall to be joined. The purpose of this practice is that the solvent is contained where I want it … surface tension prevent it from meandering about in areas you’d rather it not be (unless, of course, your solvent application gets a bit over-zealous.)
This time I was careful to align everything and took the usual precautions to insure the walls would be perpendicular to each other …
The house has a two-foot crawl space under it, so some floor reinforcement is in order …
At this point, I gave the floor and walls a test fit …
As hoped, everything lines up as planned! Excellent!
After reading the Judging Guidelines for the NMRA Merit Award, I decided that just scratch building but using commercially molded windows and doors would not yield the amount of points necessary, so an interior will be added. Most of the needed walls were fabbed up and their locations laid out on the floor of the house with very lightly scribed lines …
The usual methods were employed in solvent-welding the main longitudinal wall in place …
Then every precaution was taken to insure that the hallway and bathroom walls would be plumb …
It wasn’t long before we had a basic bathroom …
At that point it was time for another test fit of all the components fabricated and assembled to this point … just to insure that nothing will have to be redone …
The “plans” for the house indicate what appears to be (maybe) a utility closet or a linen closet in the bathroom. I have been considering using a couple of interior lights (why not if you’re going through the trouble to include an interior) and figure that this little enclosed space would be a perfect wire chase from the “ground up to the “attic” so two small pieces of styrene were welded together and, of course, test fit …
… and then welded into place …
Probably the only people who will see the trim around the interior doors will be the Contest Judges …
“Hey! Doc! I still got one more piece to cut here … whaddja do with the miter box and the backsaw?”
Time for a little light-hearted humor …
I had a Related-Arts – Environmental Design instructor at Philadelphia College of Art, an architect, who after giving us an assignment and dismissing the class, would always call out, “Don’t forget to give it an S.O.S.!” (He meant a “Sense of Scale.”)
There has been this growing pile of white stuff off to the right side of my board in many of the photos to date. It is just the dust from wire-brush cleaning the files and the small shavings from scraping the edges of parts with my homemade chisel/scraper that I haven't yet scooped up and dumped in the trash. Just for grins, at the end of a long session at the work bench, I took a photo of the pile and in honor of George Manos, AIA, a man from whom I learned bundles about architectural design (and who I eventually ended up working for part-time between classes, on the weekends and full-time during the summers) I gave the pile of shaving and styrene dust an “S.O.S.”
I welded the first two walls together the other night, just be fore calling it “a day and a night and there will be time to do more tomorrow.” I should have known better than to do such a thing when I was tired!
I awoke the next morning to discover the two walls were misaligned by 0.020” … maybe acceptable to some, but not to me, especially going after an NMRA Merit Award with this one! It’s an easy fix, though … just decide which will be “correct" and weld a 0.020” strip on the other one …
A little trimming of the excess and then filing of the opposite wall and all is copasetic, albeit an hour’s time has been wasted!
Now to weld on the second wall … more carefully this time. Notice that I have scribed a line in the “receiving” wall the thickness of the wall to be joined. The purpose of this practice is that the solvent is contained where I want it … surface tension prevent it from meandering about in areas you’d rather it not be (unless, of course, your solvent application gets a bit over-zealous.)
This time I was careful to align everything and took the usual precautions to insure the walls would be perpendicular to each other …
The house has a two-foot crawl space under it, so some floor reinforcement is in order …
At this point, I gave the floor and walls a test fit …
As hoped, everything lines up as planned! Excellent!
After reading the Judging Guidelines for the NMRA Merit Award, I decided that just scratch building but using commercially molded windows and doors would not yield the amount of points necessary, so an interior will be added. Most of the needed walls were fabbed up and their locations laid out on the floor of the house with very lightly scribed lines …
The usual methods were employed in solvent-welding the main longitudinal wall in place …
Then every precaution was taken to insure that the hallway and bathroom walls would be plumb …
It wasn’t long before we had a basic bathroom …
At that point it was time for another test fit of all the components fabricated and assembled to this point … just to insure that nothing will have to be redone …
The “plans” for the house indicate what appears to be (maybe) a utility closet or a linen closet in the bathroom. I have been considering using a couple of interior lights (why not if you’re going through the trouble to include an interior) and figure that this little enclosed space would be a perfect wire chase from the “ground up to the “attic” so two small pieces of styrene were welded together and, of course, test fit …
… and then welded into place …
Probably the only people who will see the trim around the interior doors will be the Contest Judges …
“Hey! Doc! I still got one more piece to cut here … whaddja do with the miter box and the backsaw?”
Time for a little light-hearted humor …
I had a Related-Arts – Environmental Design instructor at Philadelphia College of Art, an architect, who after giving us an assignment and dismissing the class, would always call out, “Don’t forget to give it an S.O.S.!” (He meant a “Sense of Scale.”)
There has been this growing pile of white stuff off to the right side of my board in many of the photos to date. It is just the dust from wire-brush cleaning the files and the small shavings from scraping the edges of parts with my homemade chisel/scraper that I haven't yet scooped up and dumped in the trash. Just for grins, at the end of a long session at the work bench, I took a photo of the pile and in honor of George Manos, AIA, a man from whom I learned bundles about architectural design (and who I eventually ended up working for part-time between classes, on the weekends and full-time during the summers) I gave the pile of shaving and styrene dust an “S.O.S.”
Just for you, George! Thanks for everything!
biL
Lehigh Susquehanna & Western
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." ~~Abraham Lincoln
Lehigh Susquehanna & Western
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." ~~Abraham Lincoln