El Camino Municipal Swimming Pool – 3 easy pieces

I finally had some time to work on the pool. After being left to dry for about a week or so after painting, I went ahead and added some chrome to the body and an initial row of concrete blocks - a Micro Mark brick paper - to the bottom. The 'Pool' sign was drafted out on my computer and printed on a piece of photo paper. A dab of rubber cement was used to bond it to the sign board. Now with the basic pieces in place I'm moving on to detailing.

El Camino Municipal Swimming Pool – Basic painting

The temperature popped up to around 0 a few days ago, so I used the opportunity to do some quick spray painting outside on a few projects I have on the go. Zero Celsius is far from ideal spray painting conditions – most spray can instructions say not to paint below around 10 degrees or so – but I got some satisfactory results, so in the end things worked out.

Basically, what I did was get everything ready to go in the basement, then went outside for just a few minutes to spray the paint, I then left the painted piece to outgas a bit in the garage, where is wasn’t quite as cold as outside, and then finally brought the piece back inside for proper drying. I don’t know if this would work on pieces that need smooth painted surfaces like automobile bodies due to the different temperatures of the air, paint, spray can, the piece being painted and so on, but for the buildings I’m working on, it was ok.

[Those holes in the pickup box are for future LEDs to light-up the water. I'll add some clear plastic inserts behind them to keep the 'water' from leaking out.]

I first base coated the body with a uniform application of a deep, ultramarine blue. Once dry, I then dusted it with a spray of turquoise. The turquoise is applied until the overall colour of the piece shifts from deep blue to turquoise, but allowing the deep blue base to still be seen as mingling in from below. It takes a little practice to get the mix just right, but holding the can of turquoise a few inches farther from the piece than you normally would helps. When that was dry, the roof was sprayed white – again just enough to shift the overall appearance to white without obliterating the blues below. Well, that was the plan; I wasn’t so lucky on this step and accidentally completely coated the roof in white paint with a single pass of the spray, so when it was dry, I went back and dusted it again with turquoise to restore the look I was after. I was rather happy with the end result of all this spraying and I’m thinking of buying another one of these kits and building the car straight from the box, but spray painting it in this style.

Once I’ve added a few details to the body, I think it’ll be ready to be attached to its base for final assembly.

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 :-)

El Camino Municipal Swimming Pool – Test fitting some parts

I’ve fitted the pickup bed, liberated the package tray from the interior bucket and glued it into what was previously the rear window, added some styrene I-beam to the base to boost the pool to a suitable height, and glued in a styrene sheet to fill the opening formed by the package tray and the door pillars. Also, a bit of filler was used to smooth out some joints that didn’t fit too well.

[I bought this kit a few years ago in the bargain bin at a nearby hobby shop. I like to look through sale items just to see if there is anything interesting, and cheap! I don't necessarily plan to use the items for their intended purpose, but more that they have interesting parts I might use in the future. This was one of those. It also has a great modern-style store front that I'll use someday, I'm just not too sure when that day will come and what the project will be.]

However, the most interesting job was adding the sign. It’s an item from an old Life-Like HO scale Kentucky Fried Chicken store kit. The sign’s support posts supplied in the kit were discarded, and some new ones were cut from 1/8 inch diameter styrene tubing. These new ones allowed me to tilt the sign to a more extreme angle than those in the kit and adjust the height to something that seemed right for this structure.

I usually spray paint car models and I want to do it on this project to get an ok finish on the body. Problem is I always spray outside and never in the house. With cold January weather here, I’m looking forward to the annual mid-winter thaw so I can squeeze in a little painting on some projects that are stacking up on the workbench, otherwise they’ll have to be parked until spring.