Mr. Buschel’s Barrel & Marble Works

{My beginning to a fictitious article on the Barrel & Marble Works project written in a pseudo E. L. Moore style – set your editorial-way-back-machine to sometime in the 1970s}

One day last summer Debra and I drove down to Prince Edward County to have dinner at Bob’s Truffle Hut. Her friends had been telling her great things about the place, so we went to see for ourselves. What they didn’t tell us was there was this great model railroad-able feed mill right behind the Hut. Debra went in and got us a table and I wandered over to the building to take a look before the sun went down.

Turns out it wasn’t a mill anymore, but a recyclery, barrel maker and marble works that had taken up residence in the old building. Luckily the owner’s grandson was on the loading dock to tell me some history about the place.

Apparently granddad bought the abandoned mill in the early ‘70s to house his barrel making business, He was a big fan of Evel Knievel and thought that Mr. Knievel’s exploits would inspire an upsurge in motorcycle barrel jumping, and that meant there’d be a big demand for barrels. Well, with that and the new wineries springing up in the County, it looked like blue skies ahead for the barrel biz.

The barrels-for-cycle- jumping thing never panned out, but barrels for wine, or repurposed for furniture and other odd things provided some steady income over the years. Granddad rented out the west wing to a marble artisan in the late ‘90s, and a deal with the County saw the recyclery tacked on just a few years ago. The sun was getting low, so I snapped a few pictures and popped into the Hut before the truffles got cold.

The prototype mill is big. Too big for my 6 foot by 5 foot model railroad, so building a model of it was an exercise in selective compression. That is, picking out the parts I liked, and squeezing the dimensions down to something that was just the right size for the railroad, all the while trying to maintain the vibe of the structure that attracted me to it in the first place.

Also, I didn’t want to turn this into an exercise in overly specialized construction methods and micro-detailing, but something that could be built with fairly commonplace model railroading building materials, and only about 2 weeks of concentrated work.

Some styrene sheets, Campbell scale corrugated metal siding, window and door castings from Tichy Train Group, plus a few scraps of styrene tubing and balsa are just about all you’ll need materials wise. For tools, the standard X-acto knife, scale, angle, thick super glue, pen, pencil, and a tube of styrene glue will do it. Also, you’ll need some bottles of acrylic paints, a few brushes, and some water for clean-up, but no sprays or air-brushes.

Costs? Well, if you were actually able to just buy the exact amount of materials used in this project, you could build it for about $20 to $30. Turns out, if you don’t already have a small stash of materials leftover from other projects, you’ll need to buy the materials in the pre-packaged amounts they’re commonly sold in, so it’s going to cost more – around $30 to $40 - but you’re going to have leftovers for other projects. Which is probably a good thing, because once you have a small stash of materials there’s less of a hurdle when you start new projects. I’ll discuss how to save some cash as we go through the building process.

Now, a bit of a disclaimer: I was way off on the concentrated work bit – the elapsed time for the build was roughly 6 months of only working an hour here and ten-minutes there and doing other projects in between and so on. I’m sure you’re not as lazy or disorganized as I am!

…. and on with show.

{resetting the time-machine back to the 21th century……}

Barrel & Marble Works: Painting and Finishing

This last phase of construction has been about painting and detailing.

I was complaining in the first Boneyard post about all the paints Airfix recommended - 15 in total - that one can use to paint the European Ruined Workshop. Turns out I’ve used a lot myself to paint the Barrel & Marble works: 13 if I’ve accounted correctly. Looks like I don’t pay attention to my own grumblings 

All walls that were paneled with corrugated metal sheets were base coated with a thinned wash of Tamiya Neutral Grey. The wash was created by mixing the gray paint with Testors Universal Acrylic Thinner on my palette. I also dunk the brush I’m using to mix and apply the paint into some old, sludgy water I’ve used for brush cleaning to add some additional grot to the mix.

You may have noticed in some earlier photos that there were blue lines on a number of panels. I used a blue gel pen to mark up the panels prior to cutting, and I thought the base coat of paint would hide them. I was wrong. But, something interesting did happen that I hadn’t planned on. The stuff I used to thin the wash caused the blue ink to run a bit, and a little judicious scrubbing with the brush blended everything into a nice patina – well, I’m kinda partial to it anyway.

The recyclery was base coated with Tamiya Gray Green paint straight from the bottle.

{Mixing the rust coloured paint on the palette.}

I then went to work ‘rusting‘ the roof on the Barrel & Marble Works. Rust coloured paint was mixed on my palette using Testors Model Master Acryl Rust and Tamiya Deep Green with some Testers thinner thrown in. Gradually mix small amounts of the green into the rust paint until the rust paint loses its glossiness. Even when it reaches this state, I don’t like to make the mix too uniform. I like there still to be hints of loosely mixed green still visible because I like the way it looks on the model – you’ll see some green, but not large patches, just highlights here and there. The prototype has a thoroughly rusted roof; my model doesn’t replicate that intensity of redness.

{Another session of mixing the rust paint}

The recyclery roof was washed with a much thinned version of the aforementioned rust mix. I didn’t want to obliterate the base colour of the roof, just give a hint of rust and aging.

The roof over the mystery tank at the rear of the Marble Works was painted a blue colour mixed on the palette from Testors Model Master Acryl Maritime Blue and Chevy Engine Red (which looks orange too me) to give an aged, grayed blue colour. After the roof dried, it too was washed a bit with the thinned rust mix.

{No, that's not coffee - that's the gunk wash}

The corrugated metal panels – and the walls of the recyclery - were then washed with a thinned, non-uniform mix of Testors Flat Black and Tamiya Smoke. I apply this pretty liberally to the model and use tissues and a thirsty brush – one that’s a just a little damp that can absorb pools of wash if they collect along panel lines or at eves – to control the density of paint application.

The balsa wood loading docks and framing are painted with a very loose mix of the initial thinned gray wash used on the metal panels, flat black-smoke wash, and gunk wash residue from my brush cleaning jar.

All this painting and application of washes took some time. It happened over a series of days because I like to sit back and look at the results of each step for awhile to see if any corrections or additional applications need to be made before proceeding.

The sign on the recyclery is just an item printed from my computer and glued to a basswood backing. It was washed very, very lightly with a nearly dry brush that had been dipped in the gunk wash. It’s easy to overdo it and obliterate the letters, so I’d recommend erring on the side of caution and applying several very thin washes until the desired effect is achieved. This also helps prevent the backing board from warping. The recycling logo was downloaded from the internet and prepared in the same way.

I don’t yet have a good idea for the Barrel & Marble Works signage. I’ll add these later.

The roof-top pipes on the Marble Works were made from styrene tubing. The tube wall was fairly thick and had to be drilled out to thin it down to something more scale-like. I’m not sure what these pipes are meant to drain, but I mixed up some Tamiya Purple and Tamyia Yellow Green to create a sickly gray ooze that I painted on the roof at the pipe exits. These pipes could probably use a little support structure, but I think I’ll leave them be for the time being and maybe revisit that later.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times that using the Campbell corrugated paneling and the textured plastic on the recyclery was rather un-E. L. Moore like. A more Moorian approach might have used the embossed paper method for the metal siding, and maybe scored wood for the recyclery walls. I think that if I had used those materials I couldn’t have painted the structure using the methods I did. The Moorian materials I think would have been too soft and absorbent, and may have disintegrated or warped during painting. The metal and styrene surfaces in this project can stand-up very well to repeated applications of paint, brush work, and washes, so they have at least that to recommend them even though they aren’t the most inexpensive materials to build with.

The last thing I did was add figures and props, and some plastic ‘glass’ to the windows. That’s it. I’m going to declare it done for now. There are a few buildings on the layout that I want to add a little more detail to, and I’m planning on coming back in a few months and fixing them up all at once. This one may get a little renovated then.

Barrel & Marble Works: Finished basic construction

After paneling the roofs, all that needed to be done was to add the small tower to the Marble Works, and the delivery chute to the Barrel factory. Well, I assume it’s some sort of grain or seed delivery chute that was used when it was still a mill, but now, it’s just an unused structure. As for the tower on the Marble Works, I have no idea what that used to do. I notice that it’s got pipes protruding from it that seem to have leaked something over the years.

The delivery chute and tower are made from 0.012 inch styrene sub-structures paneled with the same Campbell metal siding used on the walls and roofs. Dimensions are completely freelanced. The delivery chute also has some balsa braces added as per the prototype.

Once these were positioned and attached to the main building complex with thick superglue, adding flashing was begun. This was a rather finicky job. Strips of 8 to 12 inch wide metal strips were cut, bent lengthwise into right-angles, and then cut to fit the various locations that needed flashing: basically, wherever metal covered planes touched each other. Again, superglue was used for bonding things into place.

I added another post to support the porch roof on the Marble Works because the span looked too long. The porch roof span on the Barrel factory also looks too long for just one corner post to support. However, the prototype photos seem to indicate that there are cables attached to its porch roof that are anchored way up on the front wall of the main building. I’ll need to figure out a way to add those to the model.

That’s it for basic assembly. I can now see the homestretch for this project! I’m moving on to painting and adding some final details.

Barrel & Marble Works: Roofs installed

Title tells all I guess. I spent sometime cutting the substructures for the roofs and paneling them.

The roof pieces are cut from 0.040 inch sheet styrene. They are sized so that the overhang at the eves is about 1 scale foot.
Campbell Scale corrugated metal stock was also used to panel the roof. In this case though, I made use of the full 12 foot length of the stock and didn't cut the pieces down to 8 feet as I did with the wall siding - the width though is still 4 feet. It does seem weird: cutting up the stock into 4 foot pieces and them gluing them all down again on the substructure. The difference is that the individual pieces, when glued side-by-side, form slight ridges that help give the illusion of individual sheets - which should be enhanced when painted.

All the panels are glued down with thick super-glue. I'm moving on to adding the defunct mill substructures to the roofs.

Barrel & Marble Works: Finished wall paneling

A couple of weeks ago I received my order of Campbell Scale metal siding from George's Trains, and I have spent some free time finishing the wall siding. The siding I bought was 12 scale feet in width, so I first cut 8'x4' pieces from the stock and used that to panel the walls. I used thick superglue to attach the pieces to the styrene substructure.

As I paneled the walls I added the window and door castings once paneling on a wall was finished. The castings were primed with Floquil concrete paint prior to installation.

If I were to do this project properly I would have panelled the substructure prior to assembly, but I decided to not do too much preplanning. The next part is to add the roof, but on this part I will panel it with metal siding before I attach it to the roof.

Barrel & Marble Works: Paneling begins

In my previous E. L. Moore rebuilding projects I had used his old technique for making simulated metal panels from paper. It was rather tedious, and maybe not as high fidelity as one would hope for these days, so I decided to use Campbell Scale Models HO-scale corrugated metal siding instead. I had bought a packet of their scale 12’ wide stock back last summer at George’s Trains although I didn’t have a use for it at the time. This was both a good and bad thing to do.

I cut the aluminum strip stock into 4’x8’ panels and began gluing them to the substructure much as I did with Mr. Moore’s technique, but in this case I used thick superglue. A little misalignment and oddness to the paneling adds a bit to the look of the building, so I didn’t get to hung-up on achieving perfectly ordered paneling.

Ideally, I should have paneled the styrene substructure prior to gluing up the plastic pieces into a building. This would make the whole job easier, especially when it came to cutting and trimming around the window and door openings. It’s not that hard to do with the building built, just make sure you always use a sharp knife. Cutting the aluminum dulls the blade quickly, and I’m finding I’m using a lot of #11 blades on this project.

Now, here’s the problem. I’ve almost run out of aluminum panel stock and I’ve still got about 2/3 of the building to panel. Yikes! I knew I didn’t have enough when I started, but I casually assumed it would be easy to get more. No such luck. It’s been tough to find any in stock at various on and off line places. I’ve got some on order from George’s Trains and I’ll continue paneling when it arrives.

I can imagine some tisk-tisking from Mr. Moore. If I’d stuck with his method, I’d just make some more and it wouldn’t cost too much either.

Barrel & Marble Works: The mystery tank

A classic E.L. Moore article often included some sort of tall-tale. Maybe I’ll settle for a joke.

An acupuncturist and a porcupine walk into a bar. After a few drinks the acupuncturist leans over to the porcupine and says, “You know, the needles are supposed to go into the patient.”

I know, I won’t be giving up my day-job for stand-up comedy anytime soon.

And speaking of mysteries, at the back of the prototype there is some sort of storage tank wedged between the recyclery and the main part of the old building. I don’t know what it’s for, or what sort of structure surrounds it. It looked interesting, and I wanted to retain it, so I had to make-up something that seemed not too unreasonable.

The two candidates I had on hand for the storage tank were an old N-scale tank car and a stem holder that florists use in flower arrangements. I decided to go with the stem holder. Cutting it roughly in half and gluing a partial balsa frame around it was basically all there was to construction. I didn’t need to make a full model of this tank because most of it will be obscured by the roof that will be over it, and there won’t be any lines-of-sight that will allow a view into the building into which the tank is inserted. The tank roof itself is another guessed-at item. I didn’t have a clear view of any of the building near the tank, so I just installed a slanted roof over the tank and let it go at that.

Barrel & Marble Works: Recyclery Sub-structure

E.L. Moore published his architectural building projects in the model railroading press from 1962 to 1980. His last one was published just a few months before his death. It should go without saying that was a far different model building era than ours is here in the early 21th century. Today we have a vast selection of highly detailed kits and finished structure models that we can buy. In Mr. Moore’s time there was little available for purchasing, and the quality was nowhere near today’s standards. His work helped fill the gap with interesting projects that could be built with common materials – a fair amount of balsa and card – and average model building skills. I guess the question for today is, why bother when we have all this plenty? For me, it comes down to being able to build what you want - instead of just what’s available - without too much overhead. Once you’ve mastered some relatively simple skills, you can construct a wide range of buildings you might see in photos or out in the world. I wouldn’t recommend following all of Mr. Moore’s techniques to the letter since many are quite dated, but pursuing simple – and hopefully cost effective – methods is a worthy pursuit. There’s a path there, even though I often inadvertently stray from it now-and-then. And good humour on the journey is always important 

The recyclery – I admit I made this word up, but it seems to fit – is a new addition to the older barrel and marble works wings. Those sections were obviously parts of a mill of some sort that has been re-purposed instead of demolished. This being the case, parts of the recyclery were modeled to reflect being built from relatively new metal components. So instead of a plain styrene sub-structure, several walls are built from molded styrene whose surface will be the final surface on display. The plan with the barrel and marble works portions is to cover them with a metal siding that will be given a moderately distressed, aged finish.

The prototype recyclery is a rather large structure – far too large for the layout. I sized the model so that it fit on the layout - between the tracks separating Bunn’s Feed & Seed and Art Park – and visually retained the look of some of the prototype. I had to pay special attention to making sure various types of freight cars wouldn’t rub against the building as they were switched. In the real world it’s unlikely that clearances would be as tight as on this layout, so this is rather unprototypical, but I think an interesting scene is going to result if I can eventually pull the various visual elements together.

The upshot is that once I settled on the dimensions, I drew the walls directly on the styrene and skipped making any working drawings. The recyclery is interesting in that it’s a modern building grafted onto an older one. The old one is built from 0.040 inch plain styrene and will be paneled in the same style as the other old parts, and the new graft is cut from a sheet of Northeastern styrene that has molded panel lines to represent vertical metal siding (unfortunately I’ve discarded the plastic envelope it came in so I don’t have the part number).

With this post I’m almost caught-up with the current state of construction. Right now I’m in the process of gluing the siding to the older parts. Hopefully I’ll soon have a post on how that’s going.

Barrel & Marble Works: Barrel Works Sub-structure

One thing I don’t know is how Mr. Moore went about designing his projects. Maybe he did indeed take the logical route: imagining, to scaled drawing, to model. Maybe not. I don’t know for certain. I can’t quite discipline myself to do a detailed drawing first. I like to start building as soon as I have some sort of firmed-up idea in mind. Just a personal quirk. It makes the hobby fun since I concentrate on what I like doing, but it certainly isn’t the ideal way to build. I just thought I had to point this out because the way I show projects proceeding is far from the right way, and I didn’t want to lead you astray :-)

{Window and door openings are drawn on the wall panels.}

Anyway, the next part I worked on was the sub-structure for the Barrel Works. Again, 0.040 inch styrene was used instead of balsa. I played fast-and-loose with the windows and doors since I wanted to use items I had on hand from my Tichy Train stash - they aren't what you'll find on the prototype, but they look fine on this interpretation.

{This is a test fit of the windows and doors just to make sure all is well.}

{The corner reinforcements are being glued to the walls prior to final assembly.}

{Here it is: glued together and squared-up waiting for the glue to dry.}

Barrel & Marble Works: Marble Works Sub-structure

Real life caught up with me later in 2010 and posting ground to a halt. Hopefully things are more stable now and I can get back to writing.

I’ve been working on the Barrel & Marble Works - along with some other buildings that I plan to write about - for awhile and thought I’d post some updates on its construction. As I mentioned back in the first post, I had in mind for this project to be an E. L. Moore inspired work, but updated with a little more modern materials and construction techniques. Mr. Moore no doubt would have built the sub-structure from sheet balsa, but I decided to forego that approach and use sheet styrene instead.

The next few photos step through some of the highlights of building the substructure for the Marble Works end of the building. The dimensions are as drawn in the sketches in the first post. Sheet 0.040 inch styrene was used for the walls, and all the window and door moldings are from the Tichy Train group assortment package.

{Walls are cut from 0.040 inch sheet styrene}

{The frame for the rear loading dock is drawn on the back wall}

{The opening is scored and holes were drilled at the corners in preparation for breaking out the sheet styrene from where the door will go.}

{The pieces are flexed out.}

{After a little sanding, the frame is test fit - doesn't fit too bad}

{In the process of figuring out which windows and doors to use.}

{All the openings are cut and things fit fine}

{The walls are glued together and square stock is used to reinforce the corners.}

If you compare the prototype photos in the first post with the actual construction of the model, you can see the model isn’t an exact replica, but just an impression inspired by the real thing. The prototype is too large for my layout, so some compression was necessary, and I didn’t want to search too hard for all the do-dads I’d need to make an exact replica. What I wanted to do was capture the unique features of the prototype - the parts I especially liked - and combine those into an interesting building.

Barrel & Marble Works: An E.L. Moore style building in HO

When Debra and I were traveling through Prince Edward County in the summer we made a stop at the Armstrong Glassworks in Wellington. We’d never been there before, and I was surprised to see a relatively large old mill complex standing directly behind the shop. While Debra did some browsing, I did some photographing.

It’s visually quite an interesting complex, and it immediately struck me as something that might have sprung from the pages of an old E.L. Moore building article. It looks like it was originally some sort of mill – we were making a quick stop and I didn’t have time to hunt someone down to ask questions and take photos at the same time – that now houses businesses for making new household objects, like chairs, from barrels, a marble works and a recycling facility.

I’ve always wanted to do an original building in an E.L. Moore style, and this one struck me as the perfect candidate.

For purposes of getting started, you can think of this complex as having two major parts: the barrel and marble works on the right, and the recyclery on the left. The barrel works is that 2 or 3 storey tall structure in the centre, and the marble works is to the right of it in the smaller, appended annex.

So, here is a photo walk-around of the first part.

And here is a photo walk-around of the recyclery on the left.

One could take a variety of approaches when turning this into an HO-scale building for a model railroad. It could be ‘restored’ to its original use for railroads set in an earlier time-period. Or, one could just chose to model the centre section since it’s very distinctive on its own. I chose to model it in its present-day, 2010 form, but selectively shrunk it to fit on a smallish model railroad, and with the back wall remodeled a little to accommodate a simple rail siding. I’ll probably make other changes as I proceed, but those seem like a good starting place.

I started by making a rough sketch of what I thought the building looked like from the photos, with various dimensions downsized. You could use a drawing tool like Sketch-Up, but I’m happy with pencil-and-paper. At this stage, I’m just trying to understand how all the major parts will fit together, and the tactile immediacy of a pencil seems to help me.

Next, I decided to draw a little more accurately the outlines of the walls for the first part of the structure. I just used an HO-scale rule, a square and a pencil for this task. In sizing the complex, I have assumed that the plans must fit on 2 or 3, 8 ½ x 11 pages, in HO-scale, as if it were an old-school E.L. Moore article. At this stage I’m not concerned about all the details you’d find on finished plans, I’m just trying to work out the major dimensions and get it to look pleasing.

For windows and doors, I’m again going to forego using the classic techniques that Mr. Moore applied and use plastic moldings. I bought a window and door selection from Tichy Train Group last year, and I laid out some on the plans to see what might fit. Once I’ve cut out the walls, I’ll draw in and cut out the window and door openings directly in the wall material. At present I’m just checking rough fit, and to see if I’ve got suitable parts for this project.

I set the scaled drawing aside for awhile. Something wasn’t quite right. I think I drew the front and back walls of the marble works a little too short. I think it should be about the same length as the barrel works: 24 feet, instead of the 20 on the drawing. I’ll also make the recyclery 24 feet long so that everything looks balanced. Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what it looks like in plastic.