Bunn's Feed & Seed, Part 4: Windows & Doors

Construction of the windows and doors is probably the most retro area of this retro project. If you would like to improve the realism of this building, I’d recommend using commercial castings. I wanted the model to be fairly close to Mr. Moore’s original, so I stuck pretty close to his instructions.


[Window frames ready for installation]

Each of the window and door openings on the buildings were cased with strip wood as per the article. I pre-painted the strips prior to cutting and installing to make finishing easier. The side windows on the barn were framed first: both inside the opening, and around the outside perimeter. All the other openings were just framed around their perimeters since it appeared that inside framing unnecessarily reduced the opening size, and didn’t add to the overall look. It was tedious too.
All framing was attached to building structure with super-glue. Raw, unpainted areas on the frames were touched up after the glue had set.

Once the window and door frames were in place, the inside surfaces of the walls were painted flat black. This helps to make the walls a little more opaque, and helps to obscure interior views.

Mr. Moore recommends making the windows by first scuffing frosted acetate with pumice, and then drawing on the mullions with a ruling pen filled with black ink. I more-or-less followed these instructions. The window material is 0.020 inch clear copolyester that was lightly scuffed with a very fine sanding film to obscure the view inside.

The mullions are added by taping the scuffed copolyester to a piece of paper that has the mullion pattern drawn on and then tracing on the pattern with a fine-point, black Sharpe pen. Cut the window a little oversize so there is material to glue when attaching the window inside the wall opening.

Mr. Moore recommends making the various doors from cardstock. Once again I subsitituted with sheet styrene. All were made from 0.020 sheet styrene. For the hinged doors on the barn, the door panel pattern is drawn on the 0.020 inch styrene The door panels themselves are cut from 0.012 inch stryene and glued on the drawn pattern. The door knobs are pin heads that are attached by first drilling a hole of suitable diameter into the door with a pin-vise, and then gluing the knob in place with a dab of super-glue. The sliding doors on both the addition and the barn are made by simply scribing vertical lines into 0.020 sheets and cutting to the size specified in the article.

[Layout of a door]