Insectary 75D

Left: Insectary 75C | Right: Insectary 75D

"During World War I, there was an increased need for information for farmers in all regions of the country, to help them protect their crops and maximize production for the war effort. Other insectary sheds were built. In the 1930s, "only the unparalleled problems of drought and soil drifting outranked the trauma that resulted from insect pests." Entomologists were in great demand. By the end of World War II, with a lot of research being conducted outside Ottawa, the insectary was closed and the largest of the buildings demolished. Others remain as outbuildings or sheds (Buildings 75A, 75B, 75C, and 75D),..." Some history about the smaller Insectary buildings at Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm from the highly recommended 2021 book, Building Canada's Farm: An Illustrated Guide to Buildings at the Central Experimental Farm.

Earlier this year I had a go at creating the many windowed Insectary 75C. 75D was next on my list but I lost my desire to build it then because for some unarticulated reasons it struck me as a difficult project.

Insectary 75D is now a garage

A week or so ago I was going through my farm photos again and began to think 75D was going to be far simpler than I had first considered. If I dropped thoughts for a removable roof, operating garage door, and an interior, well, it was just a rectangular box with a roof.

However, it was going to need a little selective compression and feature adjustment to make it fit into its location on the layout.

Basically, my model is shorter, the side with doors is on the left instead of the right, and the walls have a freshly painted glow with only slight weathering.

The walls were cut from a piece of Evergreen styrene clapboard siding left over from making the office for Cal's Lumberyard. It looks like the prototype used some sort of tongue and groove siding, but I didn't have any on hand.

The garage door is also an Evergreen scrap: a styrene piece with pre-scribed parallel lines whose product number is lost to time. The side doors are styrene scraps I scribed myself.

The windows are N-scale items from Tichy Train Group.

The interior stiffening walls are cut from 0.060" thick styrene sheet scraps. Once I had them glued in place I noticed the triangular roof supports didn't quite match up with the tops of the side walls and had to be sanded back in situ.

The roof is made from 2 pieces of 0.100" styrene for the substrate, and 2 pieces of brick sheet for the shingle layer. Yeap, the asphalt shingles are bricks. I was feeling a bit lazy and wanted to bring this model to a quick finish so I thought some scraps of HO scale plastic brick sheets looked pretty close to asphalt shingles when painted a few shades of black and grey thereby making them ideal candidates for speeding this project to completion. Since the roof will be somewhat obscured by the tree canopy, the bricks-for-shingles ruse won't be too obvious to the casual viewer.

Yikes! Once again the digital camera makes quite clear little defects that need correction. I see a painting problem on the back windows that needs fixing up.

Inside the windows I added a piece of Walthers chainlink fencing material to represent the security screen behind each pane of glass. The fencing fabric doesn't show up in the photos, and is a bit hard to see in person, so maybe that little detail could have been left off.

Well, this is the last building for the farm layout. The only other major item is the tree outside Vickis Veggies then it's on to adding the myriad of details I think will be necessary to bring the layout to life. That could take a few months, but it should be interesting work.