Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Basic building finished

I don’t particularly like vines and ivy on buildings. When we bought our house, the first thing I did was strip-off and kill the ivy growing on the garage walls. I was amazed at how well it had anchored itself into the stucco and it took a lot of effort to remove it all. But, some strategically placed ivy has helped to hide a brick-paper seam on the most prominent corner of the Bookery. From the looks of Mr. Moore’s article, he also used some ivy, so it’s in keeping with the spirit of thing, and it’s ostensibly an old building, so some ivy doesn’t seem out of place.

The reason I used this ruse is that I messed up applying the brick paper at this corner. I cut the paper on the side wall too short and it didn’t go all the way to the corner of the end wall, so you can clearly see where the piece ends. If you measure things more-or-less properly, as I did with the other three corners, the edges don’t look too bad. This is a good example where you shouldn’t give up when you encounter something that didn’t quite build-up as planned, but just change course a little to fix it up.

The roof is cut from a piece of 0.080 inch styrene. It has a piece of fine sandpaper glued to its outer surface to simulate some sort of gravel roofing. Mr. Moore states he simply let the roof rest on the top layer of books. I decided to add a rail above the top book shelf and around the inner wall perimeter for roof support – it’s made of styrene channel.

The half wall – which will eventually become part of the larger courtyard perimeter wall – was built-up from styrene and covered with brick-paper. The concrete caps are also cut from styrene. The decorative spheres are 1/4 inch diameter acetal bearings superglued to the wall caps. The corner seat is wood.

Well, that’s it for the basic structure. It was fun, and at times frustrating. The next step is to site it in Scarboro Square, and build the courtyard and outhouse (which is shown in the photos in the original article, and hinted at in the text, but not described in much detail – it’s more of an afterthought).

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Furniture

I’m starting to think that if you are going to build some of these old-school projects one thing that needs to be reconsidered is the story around it. On the surface that seems somewhat trivial – and maybe a even a non-starter because although E.L. Moore often had an elaborate fictional back-story for many of his projects, many other writers from that period did not, and their works were simply straight ahead miniaturizations of prototype structures – but it helps to bring these projects into the present, and also sort of help with thinking about how they might have changed and evolved in order to survive into our time.

This update-the-story idea developed when I started to work on the furniture and siting for the Bookery If the Bookery were mine, I’d change the furniture, and since it is, I did. I’d have a big library table to spread out reading and writing materials; so I built one. I’d have a couch so I could stretch out and read a book; so I built one. I’d need some ladders to reach the upper shelves; so I added them. Well, you get the picture. You certainly could rebuild the interior exactly as Mr. Moore pictured it in his article, but I didn’t want an exact period piece, but something that was old, but had been changed a little here and there to better fit with my view of the ‘retro-future’.

The library table is made from 1/32 inch sheet basswood for the top, balsa for the legs and some 0.010 in styrene for the table-top base frame.

The chairs started out as items from an HO-scale Airfix control tower kit to which balsa legs and styrene cross-bracing were added.

The end-table has a basswood top, and a base made from a bolo-tie component.

The couch is built-up from 0.100 inch and 0.080 inch styrene.

[Jet Scott and Tawney Potter chat in Professor Potter's library]

The lady-on-the-ladder-reading-a-book was inspired by this panel from Jet Scott, Vol.1 by Jerry Robinson & Sheldon Stark (published by Dark Horse Books)– which I highly recommend.

Well, a lot more detail could be added to the interior, but I decided to leave it at this. I’m in the process of closing up the Bookery by adding the remaining side-wall and the removable roof.

Ground Effect Train

[An experimental ground-effect 'rail' vehicle; Picture sourced from the IEEE article linked to in the post.]

I stumbled across this story about a Japanese research team investigating the use of ground-effect flyers to build completely new concepts in ‘rail’ transportation. It’s still early days, but it’s amazing stuff. You know, with ground effect based vehicles a hybrid rail / water transport is a possibility – maybe something along the lines of some sort of Alexander Lippisch Aerofoil Boat ‘rail’ / water vehicle. The ‘rail’, or I guess land-based channel if you follow this Japanese line of thought, could lead the vehicle right to the water’s edge where it then flies out over the water towards another ‘rail’ on a distant shore. Wild stuff.

Train to the launch pad

[Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls]

I was reading an article this week reporting that the Voyager spacecraft will soon be leaving the region of space under the influence of our Sun and heading into interstellar space. The article eventually led to a NASA photo archive site, and being a train person I decided to search on ‘train’ to see what would come up. Among the results were some great photos of the train used to roll-out the Soyuz spacecraft rocket to its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. I’d recommend going to the NASA site directly to get all the details if you’re interested. There’s lots more photos other than these two I’ve posted, and they certainly provide some intriguing ideas for developing a freelanced launch pad layout.

[Image: NASA/Carla Cioffi]

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Books, books, books, and more books

1965 must have been quite a year for E.L.Moore. As far as I can tell, he published 6 articles about building structures in RMC, and I think that was the most articles he had published in a single year until then:

Ye Olde Corner Drugstore

Tonsorial Parlor

Small Manufacturing Plant

Major Hoople’s Brick Warehouse

Yard Blacksmith Shop

Uncle Charlie’s Bookery

I thought publishing 6 construction articles in one year was pretty impressive, but I later found out that Mr. Moore was just getting cranked up in ’65, because the following years typically saw 8 or 9 articles per year! An impressive legacy of fascinating scratch-building projects to say the least. I wouldn’t have time to build 6, let alone 9 in a single year. I find that his projects seem deceptively simple; and they are with respect to technology, but not in the number of steps and phases of construction.

Interestingly, 4 of the ’65 projects also had interiors of one sort or another, which I’m finding really adds to the total build time. They’re not all loaded up with HO-scale books, but they do have their unique construction challenges. I haven’t really built all that many interiors; in fact, I think it’s just one: the ersatz servicing area in the engine house – and that was many years ago! Well, ok, now that I think of it, there was the viewing area / interior in the Buddha’s Overlook project, although it’s far from a full interior.

The Bookery’s shelved books were rather pleasant to make. I followed the instructions in Mr. Moore’s article, but instead of painting the book spines with brush and paint, I used a selection of coloured, fine-point Sharpie pens. This made the task easier and faster. I also considered skipping the step of indenting the book strip at each spine edge with a knife. This didn’t work out because the indentation prevents the ink from bleeding between spines and gives you a nice sharp division between books.

Window blanks ready for trimming & inking.

Where the books gave some pleasure, the windows took some away. Well, the flat windows were a chore, but, surprisingly, the front bow window was rather easy. Mr. Moore stated he used commercial windows for the flat ones since he had some suitable ones around.

Inking a window on a template.

I tried to make the flat ones look sort of like the ones in his Bookery using his old-school inking method. My window openings weren’t quite square  so there was some fiddling and finessing needed to get each window to fit properly. The window beside the side door was particularly troublesome and required 4 attempts to get something that was acceptable - over enthusiastic trimming and sloppy inking on my part conspired to try my patience. On the other hand, the bow window was very easy to make and install, and went in on the first attempt. I made my version in 3 pieces; whereas, Mr. Moore made his from a single clear sheet with folds to make the bow. All my windows are held in place with Micro-Krystal Clear.

This poor thing donated the fireplace horns.

Mr. Moore’s Bookery has a clock above the fireplace mantel. The fireplace reminded me of the one in my father’s house, but his has a set of steer horns on it from a long ago trip to Texas. I liberated a set of horns from a donor toy cow leftover from a project in a larger scale, painted them a bit, and glued them above the row of oversize books on the mantel.

I think I’m in the home stretch now. I’m in the process of standing up the walls, attaching them to the base, and adding some furniture.