Last stop for barbecue

The fires are out. The tables cleared. The dishes washed. The floors swept. All that’s left is the aroma and the promise of another day.

New signs for Moe’s

Over the Christmas holiday, as well as being able to do lots of train running, I also had the opportunity to look closely at my building inventory. It was clear that many would benefit from some further detailing, and others were in need of a little repair. That work seemed like a good job to undertake in the dead of winter, and since I’ve had to order some materials for the World’s Biggest Bookstore project that build is slowing down a little. I figured in the meantime I’d do a little building renovation. 

Last summer I bought this CD called Barbecue Any Old Time. While re-organizing the CDs recently, it struck me that its logo would make a good sign for Moe’ Barbecue. So, I scanned the box, printed, and cut-and-pasted some paper signs onto some backing material – plastic for the over the door signs and wood for the main roof sign. Voila, some nice signs for Moe’s.

 Those little signs are mounted on thin styrene and are for the end-walls. The main sign was bonded to some thin basswood.

I also noticed the roof section below the clerestory was badly warped. This likely happened because it is a laminate of two relatively thick styrene sheets, two different types of glue, and metal roofing. Temperature and humidity changes, combined with dissimilar material properties, have not been kind to it. When I had a similar problem with the McGregor Park Library roof, I replaced it with a single piece of textured material; however, on this one I just added some trim to the roof edges so one could no longer see how the roof didn’t attach to the walls properly. The curvature in the roof itself seems ok given the type of building this model is meant to represent. 

 Here I've added some facia cut from 0.012 inch styrene to hide the gap between the walls and the roof.

 I freelanced a support structure from styrene pieces for the main sign.

 Here it is with the signs installed. Now I need to work on the lighting.

Moe Lass': Lighting

These days I've been mainly working on getting the workshop reorganized, but, at the same time, Moe's was nearly finished, so I thought I'd spent some time on that too.

A few weeks ago I bought some side glowing optical fibres to play around with. One thing I wanted to try was using one for a 'retro-futuristic' light fixture for Moe's. The fibre I finally chose was 3 mm in diameter, held in place with styrene tubes. Under each tube is a hole in the floor for inserting an LED. It turns out you only need 1 LED inserted at either end to light up the fibre.

The fibre is flexible to a certain extent, but it can't be bent to a 90 degree angle. The shape the fibre assumed under the windows is the most I could bend it and still feel comfortable that it wasn't going to break.

I also tried using a grain-of-wheat bulb to light the fibre, but it didn't work. Only an LED did. Also, one of the other nice things about using an LED is that you can try different colours for different lighting effects. As experiments go, this one didn't turn out too badly, but I need to add some detailing to the light fixture to give it a little more 'realistic' credibility.

As well as lighting, I got a start on the interior. It's pretty sparse so far, but I thought I'd at least get the basics in place, and one of those basics was refrigerators - got to have some where to store the meat!

Debra indulges my need for odd plastic pieces, and these little end-caps she had been saving for me came in quite handy as the basis for refrigerators.

The first thing to do was superglue some styrene sheet to the opening for doors, and scribe a line down the centre of the sheet for where the doors come together when closed. There's a lot of grinding and sanding to get the styrene to match the opening of the plastic cap.

The door handles were made from staples. A pin-vise was used to drill holes near the top of the doors for inserting the untrimmed staple pong. The trimmed prong is simply superglued to the surface of the door. This avoids the need to drill precise upper and lower holes for mounting the handles.

To help the refrigerator stand up straight, a scrap of styrene was glued to the bottom. The finished fridge is painted an aluminum colour. Some flat black was then used to paint on the gasket between the door and the fridge body.

The interior still needs a few things like tables, chairs, cooking stuff, and maybe a piano, but that is for another time.

And here's one of the big problems with a barbecue that has no doors, it can attract the wrong kind of clientele!

Moe Lass': Trial fitting the roof

I painted the roof pieces last night and then tried them out on the building. I used loose washes of PolyScale L&N grey, rust and green acrylic paint. Doesn’t look too bad. It’s starting to look something like the building in Mr. Moore’s article. I’d say major construction is done, and I’m moving on to detailing, especially outfitting the interior.

Moe Lass': Clerestory & roof

The clerestory and roof were rather satisfying pieces to build. The dimensions of these items are as specified in Mr. Moore’s article; however, I made some substitutions of materials. I didn’t have any thin balsa around for the clerestory framing, so I substituted with some 0.012 inch styrene. Same for the roof panels; I didn’t have enough scrap balsa on hand, so I used styrene instead. Also, since the roof can be removed, the styrene holds up a bit better to handling.

Mr. Moore modeled a tar paper surface on the roofs. For the era he set the building in, that was fine. I substituted in corrugated metal roofing. I figure that the roof of such a building would have been replaced a few times in its lifetime in order to survive into the 21th century, and if it were my building, I would have used a metal roofing material. Not to mention I had lots of leftover Campbell corrugated metal from the Buschell’s Barrel & Marble Works build that I wanted to use up  The metal panels were attached to the styrene substructure with super-glue.

Building these pieces isn’t complicated, but there are a number of rather simple and repetitive tasks involved. Strangely enough, I found them rather mentally relaxing to undertake. Maybe they should be promoted as a meditation technique 

[All ready for painting and weathering.]

Moe Lass': Building the fireplace

According to Mr. Moore’s article, this building is sort of representative of a sorghum processing plant dating from the mid-1800s. A building like this might potentially survive into our end of the 21th century with fairly regular maintenance and a whole lot of extremely good luck - the building would be around 160 or 170 years old today! But, it probably wouldn’t still be used for the job it was originally built to serve.

[Basically, the fireplace is built up from several layers of 1/16 inch balsa sheet.]

I struggled for awhile with this one’s story of how it could still be around, and what it might be used for these days. In the end, its massive fireplace was the key: barbecue. With a strategic site on the Lost Ocean Line it could easily be imagined to serve mouth-watering ribs, brisket, chops, chicken, duck, or whatever, to an appreciative clientele from both the industries in the east, the city in the west, and the tourist attracting beach in the centre. The primal call of barbecue is one that can’t be ignored! The aroma wafting through the countryside would no doubt be the only advertisement required. It’ll probably need its own streetcar stop to handle the customer traffic 

[The outside face of the fireplace has two semi-circular openings at ground level for creating the fire. The barbecue operation will need someone to sit back here to keep the fire going.]

I built the overall shape of the fireplace fairly close to Mr. Moore’s instructions, but I did modify the interior hearth to allow for barbecuing, so I didn’t incorporate a place for the sorghum vats. These would have been removed and lost to history during the ongoing refitting of the building over its long life.

[The hearth is so high off the floor because there is a 3-foot tall platform that covers half the floor. So, there'll be an elevated cooking area and lower area for customers.]

Mr. Moore describes a technique for weathering the Northeastern brick walls with tempera paints. Instead of following his suggestions, I decided to age things a bit using pastels since I wasn’t sure if the water-based tempera applied to the paper and balsa laminated walls would warp them a lot. The overall effect of the dry pastels is subtle, but it does tone down the shininess of the brick paper a bit.

[Those super family-sized cans of baked beans on the shelves are made from styrene tubing cut to size and filled with putty.]

I also rubbed down the edges of the brick paper with a soft lead pencil to get rid of the white edge. It sort of gives the building the look of something that’s been drawn with a pencil and then filled in with colour, but that’s ok with me. Some more general weathering is probably on the horizon for this building, but I’m going to ease into it.

Moe Lass': Applying brick paper

[The walls have been temporarily tilted up to see how things look before aging and adding the fireplace.]

I covered the balsa walls with MicroMark brick paper – specifically with their ‘aged brick’ product. I’m not a paid shill for that company, but I am rather partial to their line of brick papers. The detailing and colour are quite good, and I like the adhesive backing.

Looking at the photos in Mr. Moore’s article it looks like the Northeastern brick material he used only has the brick pattern on one side, and the other, the interior side in this project, is simply an un-patterned wood. I decided to brick both sides since that seemed more appropriate for this sort of backwoods building.

I think the most important tip to working with brick paper I can give is to always have a sharp blade in your knife when making cuts. At the slightest sign of tearing, or drag on the blade, change it for a sharp new one. This does use up blades – I think I used maybe 5 or 6 all told for balsa and brick paper cutting so far – but it’s probably the single most important technique to helping get the cleanest and most accurate build at this stage. You don’t necessary need to discard those slightly dulled blades, just set them aside for other tasks like working with styrene.

One other tip I should note is that I use a thin application of thick super glue on the balsa edges when I’m applying 1/16 inch strips of brick paper to cover them. I’ve found that the brick paper’s adhesive sometimes isn’t enough to hold these thin strips in place on the often uneven and rough balsa end-cuts. When covering large, flat expanses of wall, the paper’s own adhesive backing is sufficient and doesn’t need anything extra to hold it in place.

E. L. Moore’s Moe Lass’ Old Sorghum Mill - Cutting the Balsa Walls

[After the walls were cut out, I tilted them up to see how they looked.]

This is another one of those E.L. Moore projects that attracted my attention, but I can’t quite put my finger on why: the clerestory, the large fireplace, large front windows, and an overall interesting shape seem to add up to something for me. Mr. Moore published this project in the April 1966 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman, and like 1965, this was another year where he was very prolific and published 6 building construction projects in RMC. And it turned out that this project was one of the simplest.

Ontario is too far north for a sorghum mill, so I’ll repurpose it. Apparently, Mr. Moore looked ahead to just such a possibility,

Well anyway, it’s a picturesque sort of building and if you have no desire for an antiquated sorghum mill you can always find other uses for a sturdy structure of this sort.

What the new use will be, I’m not too sure just yet.

Mr. Moore was a balsa aficionado, so although he used a material called Northeastern brick for the walls that I’ve not been able to find, I’ve substituted with 1/16 inch sheet balsa - which is the material specified for the floor and roof - that will be covered with MicroMark brick paper in keeping with the old-school nature of this build.

When I finally decided to get started on this project I was having a little trouble getting my mind settled down. I eventually decided to put my DVD of Around Midnight into the tv, and after watching for awhile, I was ready to have a go. I haven’t seen this movie in a very long time and I’d forgotten how good it is. I won’t win any awards for speed in cutting out the walls since it took the entire movie, plus the first quarter or so of The Endless Summer - although I do admit to more movie watching than balsa cutting :-)