Thanks, Matt. The screws were pretty-much a necessity, as some of the walls were warped. I also didn't want to trust glue alone to keep things intact, especially during construction, as it gets handled quite a bit.

Wayne

doctorwayne Wrote:Thanks, Matt. The screws were pretty-much a necessity, as some of the walls were warped. I also didn't want to trust glue alone to keep things intact, especially during construction, as it gets handled quite a bit.

Wayne

Wayne, do you have a closer shot of those screw. I'm curious. I'll have to build a cement plant in the upcoming months. The general design of the plant is similar to a roundhouse with track embedded in concrete slab and a superstructure on colums.

Matt

I'm not sure that these photos will show much of use. The screws are all flathead 1-72s, with the ones holding the walls together mostly 1/4" or longer, and the ones holding the .060" thick floor in place being 3/16" long. I used a #29 drill to countersink the screwheads. The visible ones will be covered with epoxy autobody filler.

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Wayne

Your work amazes me Wayne. You make the best looking buildings and make them look so real.
We need a hundred people to give you the thumbs up you deserve.
Charlie

Thanks, Charlie, but I think that those screws may be a little out-of-scale for HO. I have some trepidation about the way that the roundhouse will look when it's finished, mainly depending on how the brick detail looks once it's painted and weathered.

Wayne

Well, there may have to be some extra downspouts...
Charlie

Wayne,

Any progress on this project?

Matt

Absolutely no progress on anything layout-related, Matt. My younger daughter and her husband have bought another house and I'm helping with reno work: complete kitchen tear-out, walls removed, re-routing ductwork, moving plumbing, re-wiring, patching and painting, etc., etc. Moving day is Dec. 28th, but move-in day will likely be sometime mid-January or later.

Wayne

doctorwayne Wrote:Absolutely no progress on anything layout-related, Matt. My younger daughter and her husband have bought another house and I'm helping with reno work: complete kitchen tear-out, walls removed, re-routing ductwork, moving plumbing, re-wiring, patching and painting, etc., etc. Moving day is Dec. 28th, but move-in day will likely be sometime mid-January or later.

Wayne

You just switched scale for 1/1. Though a little bit more intensive. Good luck, seems to be a big undertaking.

Matt

Well, just to take a break from a few other projects, I've revived (for now, at least) the roundhouse project, so have a little bit of progress to share.

I filled-in the countersunk holes for the screw heads, and then I skipped the rattle can primer step (mainly because I forgot that I was going to do it). Instead, I spent some time masking over the door and window openings and covering the tracks completely, then airbrushed all of the exterior walls with Floquil Reefer Orange - an entire bottle of it! I guess I shouldn't have skipped the primer.
Before painting, I added a small annex onto the rear wall...it's from a Walthers kit, but don't recall which particular one. I'm calling it the foreman's office. There's not much real estate for some other things that should be included with a roundhouse, like parts storage, a steam plant, change room and showers for the employees, etc., etc.

The stonework was done with a mixture of PollyScale and Polly S paints, applied with a brush. It's not as dark in person as it appears in the photos, and will likely lighten considerably when I add the drywall mud "mortar".



...here's the annex...



I've left most of the masking tape in place, hoping to keep the drywall mud to the exterior of the structure...



I also altered the Kingmill paper-on-styrene building flat in the background, cutting out one set of doubledoors to create an alleyway for pedestrians and the occasional automobile, and will add a crossing over the tracks....



Once the mortar is done, I'll either paint the interior of the walls and the trusses, or perhaps apply some brick paper to the interior. I don't plan on adding too much detail, though, and definitely no lighting, but I can't leave it looking abandonned, as it's at eye-level and right at the edge of the layout where you enter the room.

After that, I hope to do the construction of the remainder of the trusses and the roof. I'm also puttering with the Walthers turntable, and have installed a motor and gear train, from a scanner, I think. I was going to use an old trainset transformer to power it, but I'm leaning towards using a wallwart with an AC output, and hooking-up one of my SCR throttles to give me both directional control and more precise movement, as there's no automatic indexing.

Wayne

Wayne, I am glad to see you back at this one. I know it will be very impressive.
Charlie

Still plugging away at the roundhouse, and I thought that I'd taken a photo of the "mortar" application, but can't find it. Anyway, here's the results of the application after the excess has been rubbed off...







The window frame is just sitting in place - I won't install them until the interior has been painted.

A few days after finishing the mortar work, I decided to weather the brick, as I was concerned about how it would look. I used a wash of well-thinned PollyScale paint, with a couple drops of dish detergent added, applied with a 3/4" brush, then added the "soot" over the doors using artist's pastels. I simply rub the pastel stick on some coarse sandpaper, then dump the resultant powder into a suitable container, and use an old brush to apply it to the structure. Since it's unlikely to get much handling, no fixative was added....







I need to do some additional work on the turntable: while the bridge and its track is now powered (SCR walkaround throttle, powered by a 9 volt AC wallwart for bridge operation, and track voltage through a reversing switch on the fascia for track power), the turntable bridge sits too low in the pit, with major bumps for anything entering or exiting the bridge. I think a washer of the proper thickness is all that's needed.

Wayne

The weathering really adds to it. Looking great.
Charlie

Nice work!

The weathering makes a big difference!