Machine tools found!

Cast your mind back to late October of last year. I know it seems like a very long time ago, but that was when Martin solved The Mystery of Uncle Peabody's Machine Tools. A mystery that was first discussed even further back in time, in May of last year!

Martin reports that he recently purchased a complete and unopened set of those machine tools. 

He generously allowed me to post his pictures so we could wrap up this little bit of E. L. Moore esoterica.

The machines look well molded, although they seem to have a little flash that'll need trimming. Overall though, they look pretty good considering they're likely 50 to 60 years old.

Updating the back wall

In the last instalment I ended the post by mentioning that I wasn't that happy with the door arrangement on the back wall. 

I eventually realized I wasn't going to be happy with this project if I didn't go back and try to fix what was irritating me. So that's what I did.

I had glued the back wall into place and had to see if I could pry it off. After some careful work, I did eventually separate it without damage.

The plan was then to remove those door inserts on either end and replace them with brick inserts. And then when that was done, replace the brick insert in the middle with a door.

It turns out none of those three inserts could be pried loose. They were permanently stuck in place.

So, on to plan B. 

First, I cut out most of the centre brick insert with an Xacto knife. This leaves a small ridge on the side edges, but still leaves a plenty big opening for a door.

Second, some pieces of styrene brick sheet were cut to fit over the side doors and then glued in place.

The sticker on this brick sheet says it is HO scale, but also notes that the bricks are 1:100 scale, somewhat smaller than HO. Either way they are bigger than the N scale bricks moulded into the kit's walls. I can live with that. These are on the back wall, and having different bricks inserted into panels on renovated old buildings isn't unusual. Once painted, they fit into the overall look of the building.

Before moving on to finishing and detailing I thought I'd check the fit of the centre door and make sure a pickup could enter. You can see it's a tight squeeze, and if you're not careful you could lose a side-mirror.

Look, if I hadn't glued a brick panel in that opening, and then had to cut it out - leaving some edge material behind - the fit of the kit's opening would be plenty wide to accommodate a vehicle as wide as a typical pickup. 

Using some styrene tubing and thin sheet I cobbled together something that resembles an overhead door for the truck entrance. It would be great if it could open and close, but I modelled it as permanently open. 

The elevator block is built up from 0.040" styrene sheet for the main structure and doors. The corners are reinforced with 0.060" x 0.060" strip styrene.

Some 0.020" x 0.040" styrene strip is used to trim the door openings. 

You can see where the idea for the centre truck entrance came from: with it one can back a truck almost up to the lower elevator door for easy unloading. 

And there it is. Bumper strips have been added to the sides of the truck entrance and the new brick inserts have been painted.

The elevator block hasn't been glued in place, but in this test placement you can see how the elevator and truck entrance doors line up - ok, they're a little off in this photo, but I think the idea is clear.

Hmm, I also see a lot of dust on the windows :-(

With this door annoyance resolved, I can go back to working on the interior.

Temporarily sprung

Not much model building happening. Earlier this week the weather was unusually good - sunny and around 19C - so we hopped in the car and went for a long drive. Completely socially distanced in our rolling metal box we never encountered another living soul. On other days we soaked up the sun on the back porch. But now the rain is back and the basement calls.

Walls and Windows and CURRENtoons

In the last instalment of the 30Squares HQ build I stopped at the point where I needed to think a bit about how to proceed with the interior.

I thought and thought and thought.

Eventually I settled on a two floor arrangement with an elevator between stories. 

Picking up where I left off, the next step was to glue a styrene ledge on the walls to support the second floor. For this I used 2mm x 4mm Evergreen styrene strip.

The ledge was set 2 scale feet below the second floor window sills. I think this makes the windows a little too close to the floor, but there isn't much room as some space needs to be left for gluing the first floor window frames to the walls. 

Once the ledges were installed, 0.125" square styrene verticals were glued to the inside of the wall pilasters to give some dimensionality to the wall surfaces. Verticals will also be installed on the second floor after the second floor is glued in place. 

One thing to note about the vertical pieces is that the surface that abuts the wall needs to be slightly notched so the vertical will fit into the base when the wall is glued to the ground floor.

The second floor is cut from a sheet of 0.040" styrene. 

The square grid I've penciled on the piece is a projection of the grid formed by the wall pilasters. I used them to help me think about where to place the elevator shaft, which will be a square section column placed in the opening. 

The elevator shaft will only fill the back half of the opening, and will leave a square opening in the floor so that persons on the second floor can see down to the ground floor - and vice versa of course :-) I'll need to add a second floor railing for safety's sake.

At this point I decided to move on to painting the walls.

The insides were painted with Tamiya XF-76, Gray Green.

The floors were painted with Tamiya XF-80, Royal Light Gray.

The outer wall surfaces were painted using a procedure similar to the one I used last summer on the Weekly Herald project.

Although, I did make a couple of modifications to the process. 

First, on the Weekly Herald I primed the walls with a spray of Tamiya's white surface primer, but I didn't do that here. This kit's walls are a light brown colour instead of an acid yellow, so I thought it was ok to work directly on the pieces (recall that I had washed them in the last instalment in order to remove any traces of mould release). 

Second, I mixed the brick colour using Revell Aqua Colour instead of Model Master acrylics. As you may know, I'm trying out new acrylics since Model Master paints have been discontinued.

The brick colour mix I used was Revell's 36137, Reddish brown, and 36162, Mossy green. The green is to dull the brown to a more weathered bricky colour. I mix the paint on my palette to keep the colour loose, and the ratio is about 3 reddish brown to 1 green. Once the base brick layer colour was painted on, some thin washes of gray, reddish brown, and flat black were applied for further weathering. The result isn't superdetailed bricks, but something more impressionistic. 

I haven't trashed my remaining Model Master paints. I used their Aged Concrete Flat for the window sills. I use this paint a lot in my practice and bought what my local hobby store had left. I'm sorry to see it go, but I think I can mix a substitute from Revell's 36189, Beige. Who knows, it might be even better than what I've been using!

Finally, the window frames were sprayed with Krylon Colormaster Hunter Green Satin. I don't know if that product is still available. I had a can on the shelf, and when a 10C day presented itself, I gave the window frames a spray. The thought of brush painting them all seemed a little too masochistic. 

Speaking of windows, the kit comes with clear pieces that have moulded on window mullions. These are good pieces, but I thought the mullions were a little too closely spaced for an HO-scale model, and once painted, they would obscure the views inside, which sort of defeats one of the main features of this project. 

I decided to replace the kit's windows with ones cut from some clear plastic sheet I had on hand. I don't recall the plastic's specifications other than its from a huge sheet I bought in 2019 at an art supply in Syracuse, New York, when John, Gail, Debra, and I went to the city's train show that year. Little did we know it would be the last train show for who knows how long. At the time I thought the giant sheet would last the rest of my life. I've used more than half of it, so either the reaper is nearby, or I need to get more - I think it's the later :-)

To each piece of 'glass' I inked in a border with a Sharpie pen. The border helps to neaten the interior, and hide the bond to the window frame. They were glued to the frames with Weld Bond.

The individual window panes seem a little too big for HO-scale, but they afford good views to the inside.

After painting, and then gluing in all the window components, I really wanted to see how this thing looked. So I decided it was time to get hammered!

No, not that, this: I glued the entrance wall to a side wall, and then glued that assembly to the ground floor, using strategically applied hammers to hold the thing while the glue dried. 

Once dry, it was time to glue on the back wall. 

I don't use these old ball-peen hammers for hammering much these days. They're relics from my father and grandfather, but they come in handy at times. Although I wouldn't recommend this technique if animals or small children are running around, as these are precariously balanced.

Left: A stack of '70s CARtoons; Right: A few of today's CARtoons

While glue was drying I popped out to a hobby store I hadn't visited since well before the pandemic began. Restrictions had eased back a bit, and I wanted to get out. I found an AMT '72 GMC Jimmy kit that looked like a full sized restoration of a GMC pickup a friend has underway, but the biggest surprise was seeing the new incarnation of CARtoons on the magazine shelf. 

For awhile in the '70s I bought it and its sister publication, Hotrod Cartoons, almost as frequently as Model Railroader. CARtoons has been modernized - in a good way - but it still strikes a chord. Looking back, I think it's because a lot of its stories have to do with people building cool custom cars from junk and seemingly odd combinations of stuff. I was a plastic car modeller, influenced by CARtoons and Car Model magazines, well before model train stuff grabbed me, so I think that the 'kit-mingling' and 'make stuff from odd components' vibes, which were themes of those publications, followed me into model railroading. Maybe there needs to a CURRENtoons magazine to honour the master of kit-mingling, Art Curren :-)

Anyway, once the glued had dried on the walls and ground floor, I slipped in the second floor to see how it looked. I didn't glue it in place just yet. 

The fit is pretty good. 

I then carefully press fit the fourth wall onto the base. No glue was applied, I just wanted to test the fit and see how things looked. 

I was happy that it fit quite well. The kit is precise and well moulded, so maybe this shouldn't be a surprise. 

Ok, the roof isn't on, the place is filled with light, but the views inside are quite good. There'll be lights installed, so even when the roof's on, you should be able to see inside rather easily.

Although, one thing I realized I could have done better was the arrangement of doors on the back wall.

For awhile I thought the building would house two tenants, so I'd have two delivery doors, one on each side. But, when I changed it to one tenant, I should have placed a single delivery door in the centre, with brick inserts on the sides. And I should have left the door open, or at least made a moveable one. That way a pickup could drive inside and back up right to the elevator in the centre of the building. That would have added the potential for some interesting scenes. Oh well, maybe on the next one :-)

You can see the doors and associated openings are big enough to drive in automobiles or pickups, so there's potential for a variety of businesses to be supported by other minglings of this kit. 

That's it for now.

Next up: detailing the interior.

Godzilla vs P-38 Lightning

I'm working away on the Revell P-38 kit. I suspect this isn't considered one of the best models of that airplane. Part fit is not that great, and I can see a lot of filling and filing and fitting on the horizon. You can see many issues in the photo. I'll need to make a decision about how far to go with that work.

Although it's not the greatest kit, this project is sort of a sentimental journey. The P-38 was one of my father's favourite planes, and in a post at the long defunct retroDynamics from back in 2009 I included a scan of one his P-38 postcards in a story about Godzilla and disk planes. It's a little hard to explain, so here's the old post.

From 29 April 2009:

Early last summer I stumbled across the comic book reprints offered by DC and Marvel in their DC Showcase Presents and Marvel Essentials series. Basically, these are 500-page volumes of reprints of selected comic books in black-and-white form. Well, I dove in and bought and read a number of titles that I either was forbidden to read as a kid or missed entirely. I readily admit there was no intellectual value in this comic reading extravaganza, but it was fun. Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the Marvel Essentials series is a one-volume collection of all the comics in Marvel’s Godzilla title published in the late ‘70s. All I can say is that it is one weird, absurd and hilarious read. The storyline does appear to run out of steam near the end of the series, but it was probably tough to dream up things to do for two years for a character whose main attributes are stomping around and breaking big things.

[The cockpit is huge]

There’s an incredible collection of strange flying machines in Godzilla, but the ones that caught my eye were the seemingly circular wing interceptors used by S.H.I.E.L.D. From my haphazard reading of comics, it seems that flying things whose primary feature is a disk are usually some sort of alien spacecraft: classic flying saucers. Atmospheric airplanes flown by human beings whose wing is a disk or circle seem almost nonexistent, so I was surprised to see these.

[The wing planform looks elliptical - that's gotta hurt !]

When I was looking up the pictures for this post, closer examination suggested that the wing may be actually a rather fat ellipse and not a circle at all. I think I jumped to the circular wing conclusion because I was biased that way, and I figured the perspective views of the planes were just distorting the circular planforms into ellipses, but they really do look like rather fat elliptical planforms when you study the drawings more carefully.

[A P-38 postcard, from the 1940's I think] 

As well, their twin boom design and large cowls instantly reminded me of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. However, unlike the P-38s, these S.H.I.E.L.D disk-planes can also hover. How they might do this is obviously a quirk in the physics of the Marvel universe.

[It can somehow hover - and no downwash!] 

Mr. Herb Trimpe and Mr. Tom Sutton are attributed as the Pencillers or Artists in this series, so I assume they invented these airplanes. They did a great job; the planes have a ring of truth to them.

E. L. Moore and The Toy Man

 

I was watching this interesting video over at Toy Man Television and started to wonder if the 'mountain man' who's technique was being used was E. L. Moore. Turns out it was.

I don't think E. L. Moore used this technique in anything larger than HO scale, but the results look quite good in 1:20.3 too. Although The Toy Man has added a good method for enhancing the effect with grout.

Overplus Interior

Barbecue interior from scraps.

Overplus interior: A miniature building interior that is built more-or-less exclusively from scrapbox items.  

Usage: All buildings along the front edge of the layout were outfitted with overplus interiors.

Source: Jackie Hole's article, Overplus Interiors, in the June 1998 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman, is the first known use of the term. The article explains how to detail the ground floor interior of an HO scale hotel.  

The caption on one of the article's photos succinctly captures the essence of the overplus interior: Overplus equals leftovers.

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.

Plastic Ptherapy Experiment

I'm looking for some diversion from my usual modelling work, so I've decided to cook-up my own pform of ptherapy, and it doesn't involve pterodactyls, just plastic.

Select a kit from your stash that calls out to you. Something different from your usual is best; I chose Revell's 1/48 scale P-38 Lightning. Start to work on it, but concentrate on the basics of shaping, assembling, and brush painting.

If while you're working on the first kit, some other kit catches your interest, start working on it too. Try to pick something in a genre different from the first kit - I chose Walthers Backshop. This gives you some different types of parts to work with as a change of pace. If another kit makes its presence known, don't hesitate to start that one too - AMT's GMC Jimmy called attention to itself. You now have a few kits in different genres to fiddle with, presenting you with a variety of pleasant tasks. For a bonus, toss a wood kit into the mix for extra flavour.

Don't worry about deadlines or completion. Focus on the activity itself.

Laurence Gieringer, Model Structure Pioneer

Some Gieringer models; Snippet from Model Builder Jan/Feb '38

The pandemic rolls on and continues to inflict a wide range of changes on society well beyond the horrible toll of human suffering and death. Even something as innocuous as Roadside America has fallen victim. 

In November 2020 Roadside America in Pennsylvania closed its doors for good, and its owners announced they were auctioning off everything, miniatures and all. The owners had been looking for a buyer for a couple of years prior to its closing, but pandemic restrictions eventually finished it off, ending an 85 year run. Reports indicate the January 2021 auction was a great success, but a bittersweet one for the owners, who are relatives of Roadside America’s founder, Laurence Gieringer.

It’s weird how I found out about this. I was reading my way through a stack of Railroad Model Craftsmans from 1997, and in December’s Collector consist …column Keith Wills had an interesting story about Roadside America, its founder, and how after 50 years of wanting to visit the place he eventually did. After reading the column I was off to the internet to find out more about Roadside America, and that’s when I learnt of its recent closing.

But what really grabbed me in that column was the story of how Mr. Gieringer got interested in miniature buildings and layouts. It seemed that he followed the path from folk art miniature builder to serious hobbyist. It was the discussion of Mr. Gieringer’s roots that helped make this clear to me. Here’s what Wills has to say,

Laurence Gieringer started creating model buildings as a boy by carving and cutting wood. As carpenter and painter, his skills gave him freedom to develop his hobby further, often inspired by actual buildings in the area where he lived. Not having formal training, he settled on three-eights inch scale in which to make them.

Laurence built everything from wood, found and given, particularly important during the Depression. If one were to upend a building, one might see pieces of old yardsticks and other found materials. He was given a shipment of furniture considered unsalable, and the wood in it ended cut up into miniature buildings. He handmade parts en masse, spending time turning out roofing shingles, framed windows and railings for future use. His approach to modelling was decades in advance of his time. When most hobbyists in scale or tinplate were content to have lithographed cardboard, wood-braced buildings on their layouts, Gieringer was constructing his with lapped siding, individually shingled roofs, framed windows; not printed, and laboriously made faux stained glass. Many of his buildings have interiors and reveal an attention to detail missing from that era, not to be found until recent decades.

Mr. Gieringer’s memorial at findagrave.com seems to confirm Wills’ thoughts,

Laurence T. Gieringer (13 Jun 1893 - 13 Jan 1963)

At the turn of the century, near Reading, Pennsylvania, Laurence Gieringer, age 5, often looked out of his bedroom window at night, gazing toward nearby Neversink Mountain. Crowning the mountain was the Highland Hotel with lights that twinkled and beckoned. To little Laurence, the glittering white building looked like something from a fairy tale, small enough to pick up and carry home. One day, the boy decided to do just that. Leaving the safety of his backyard, he set off through the woods to find the mountain top and the "toy" building. The inevitable happened. Laurence became bewildered, then completely lost. After a frightening night alone in the woods, he was found by anxious searchers the next morning. Despite this experience, the boy was to retain his interest in "toy" houses for the rest of his life. 

Going to work at age 16, Laurence, after a start in the printing trade, became a carpenter and painter, work which he felt gave more scope to his particular talents. Always he continued to work on his hobby of making model buildings. Skillfully, he whittled at blocks of wood, fashioning them to his dream of a miniature village … a church … bridges … a horse-drawn carriage … stables … farmhouses. He knew nothing of drawing to scale, yet arbitrarily established a size of 3/8" to the foot, which he adhered to in all his modeling. 

And Mr. Gieringer’s granddaughter, Dolores Heinsohn, also backs this up in an interview with Penn Live / Patriot-News on how he got started on his life’s work,

“In 1903, when he was about nine years old, him and his brother were chased out of the house, as young boys, because they were underfoot in the kitchen - they were stealing the dough that my great grandmother was baking,” Dolores said. “They climbed up on top of the mountain at Mount Penn, near the [Reading Pagoda]. And they looked over the city of Reading. And they hatched this idea of building miniature buildings.”

As he grew older and honed his skills, Gieringer began to craft everything to scale — 3/8th of an inch to one foot - and continued making models as a hobby on his off hours. It was a hobby that Gieringer would continue for all of his life, Dolores said, and one that he made public following his victory in a Christmas contest published in the Reading Eagle in 1935.

Wills also mentions in his column that Mr. Gieringer published a number of articles in Lionel’s Model Builder magazine in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Several were about how to construct model buildings. This caught my attention. It looks like Mr. Gieringer is the only person I’ve found so far who clearly got started by practicing that old miniature buildings hobby - I dare say folk art - and migrated to the more modern hobby of model railroading, bringing the full force of the skills he had developed and offering them as examples to follow in the pages of a popular model railroading magazine. If you’re a longtime reader here you know I think E. L. Moore also took the folk art to model railroading path, but I don’t have as strong a link, other than his early practice was more characteristic of the folk art sensibility than model railroading. This is all speculation on my part, and with speculation being a foundational principle of the internet, all my ramblings need to be taken with a grain-of-salt :-)

Anyway, Vince did some great work and found a list of Mr. Gieringer’s Model Builder publications (As always though, I take responsibility for the content here, so if you have any issues with or questions about the list, please let me know):

1938

Jan / Feb: 35 Year Old City

1941

Oct: World’s Largest Model Railroad

1945

Jan: How to Make Trees, Part 1

Feb: How to Make Trees, Part 2

Mar: How to Make Foot Bridges

Oct: Down by the Old Grist Mill

Nov: Modern Store Block

Dec: Model Foundry

1946

Jan: Rock Work

Apr: Electric Shop

Sep: Gas Station

Oct: Vacation Whistle Stop

Nov: Down on the Farm

Dec: Old Red Barn

1947

Jan: Chicken on Dutch Rye

Feb: Cart & Wagon Wheels

Mar: Wagon and Chassis

Sep: Express and Huckster Wagons

It isn’t an extensive publication list, but the models he shows, and the techniques he discusses, are high quality, as Keith Wills mentioned.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Gieringer didn’t publish in Model Railroader or Railroad Model Craftsman, but ads in MR indicate he did publish some articles in Toy Trains magazine, which I haven’t yet seen.

It’s another piece in the puzzle about model railroading's roots. The search continues!

A repurposing of Heljan kit B120

I don't think I've written about the conversion of Heljan's kit B120 to The Cake Lab, but since I mentioned the kit in the concluding Art Metropole post I thought I should at least show the kit that donated the crown decorations.

I bought the kit sometime around 2014 or so at George's Trains. It's a rather nice example of a modern train station. Although of European architecture, I thought the basic building wouldn't be out of place in a mid-century Toronto setting. In 2016 I repurposed it into The Cake Lab, which was the name of a company a friend of ours had recently started. I didn't use the kit's decorations on the model, so they were stashed away in the spares box for 'future use'. It turned out the future arrived a few weeks ago!

Breaking ground for the new 30 Squares World Domination HQ

I've been intrigued by Walthers N-scale Backshop kit (Walthers part #933-3227), and their N-scale Car Shop (Walthers part #933-3228), for sometime. I liked all those large windows, and it seemed that either of the kits could be converted into some sort of small HO-scale building. Maybe an old light industrial building that had been saved from the wrecking ball and turned into shops or offices. Maybe a headquarters for the 30 Squares World Domination Media Empire :-)

I looked online for one of those kits, and they all seemed to have high shipping costs. Luckily when the pandemic restrictions eased back a bit I was able to pay a visit to my local hobby shop, and lo-and-behold, I found a Backshop kit on the shelf. It wasn't a bad price, and the only shipping costs were those associated with me driving it back home.

Once I got it home and studied the parts for awhile it was clear something in HO could be built from it. The bricks might seem a little small, but with some careful painting they won't look too bad.

The first step in construction was to wash all the parts. I've been watching videos at QuickKits, and over there Owen recommends washing with mild dish soap and a dash of vinegar. So, that's what I did. I used a plastic storage box as a wash basin.

After some mild scrubbing and rinsing, the sprues were set out on the kitchen counter to dry.

There aren't a lot of parts in this kit, but they are all nicely moulded. The only pieces missing from the photo are the clear plastic inserts that are supplied for the windows.

The first bit of actual construction was to figure out what the entrance was going to look like. I had some ideas going into this, but they were much refined by what I could find in my spares box.

The doors are cut from an HO-scale Walthers 24-Seven Quick Mart kit (Walthers part #933-3477). I bought that kit years ago and started it. I intended it to be a Macs Milk store, but put it aside before it was even close to being done. I figured I was never going to finish it, so I cut the doors from its facade. 

The centre window is a Grandt Line O-scale item I bought years ago. I don't know the part number, but you can see it just fits in the opening.

That door unit on the far left is a moulding that I rejected as looking a little too rustic for this project.

If you were building this kit box-stock as a backshop, the ground level openings are where the rolling stock goes in. Walthers provides brick inserts for them if for some reason you don't want openings, and you just want to close them up. 

These inserts are excellent, and came in quite handy. Instead of building custom inserts, all I had to do was cut openings in the ones the kit provided. 

In this photo all the doors, windows, and brick inserts have been installed in the front and back walls.

The other great thing about the kit not shown on the box top picture is that it comes with 6 roll-down door mouldings if you want to model your kit with closed doors. I used a couple on the back wall, and glued an unmodified brick insert in the centre opening.

The base needs a little bit of modification, but nothing serious. The slots for the rails were filled with putty - I used Deluxe Materials Perfect Plastic Putty - and sanded it to conform to the base when dry. 

I'll likely add a step or two to the front wall, so even these puttied up openings might be concealed by the steps.

The inspection pit openings needed to be covered over.

A new floor was cut from a piece of 0.020" styrene sheet. That thickness brings the floor up to the level of the wall alignment tabs that are moulded on to the base's sides.

I did a bit of an experiment in bonding the floor to the base. I was concerned that styrene glue would put warps and puckers into the floor's surface, so I used 3M transfer tape to hold the two together. The photo shows the tape attached to the base awaiting removal of the carrier paper.

Since one will be able to see inside, I filled the interior side wall pilaster indentations with strips of 0.040" styrene to bring them flush with the wall surface.

These were glued in place with Deluxe Materials Plastic Glue. With the cancelation of Rustoleum's Model Master paints, I'm trying non-Rustoleum products in case all their model building materials are being discontinued. This Deluxe Materials glue seems good. This is the first project I've used it on.

Here's a finished side wall with the upper edge from the kit glued on.

So far, so good.

Once the walls and floor were finished, I temporarily tilted up three walls to start thinking about how I was going to build and detail the interior. And that's where I'm at now: thinking.