Building out the mountain under the observatory

Rock work at Observatory Peak is finished

I can't help but start this post with a weather report as all my modelling these days is quite weather dependent: yesterday, 38°C on the deck, 34°C in the garage, 31°C in the shade, 25°C in the basement. The heat is predicted to remain for a couple more days. What all this adds up to is a bit of subterranean modelling time at higher elevations where it's a pleasant 25.

Stones glued in place to form boundary around the initial CelluClay application

After an initial application of CelluClay to build out the DAS base holding up the observatory some stones were glued in place to provide a boundary and add some natural shape to the feature.

Mountain extension before painting

When I bought my bag of CelluClay back in October 2021 it was so big - the 5lb bag was all that was in stock at my local store - I thought it would last the rest of my life. Well, it turns out with this little project I'm now scraping the bottom of the bag, so to speak, but I feel I have lots of years left in me, although my ability to estimate CelluClay usage is clearly impaired :-)

Moon Mail Madness. Lunar surface is 1/8" thick layer of CelluClay

On a side project I used a considerable amount of CelluClay to create a lunar base for my Moon Mail Madness diorama for an upcoming model show here in town. More on this in a future post.

Mountain side facing the Circular Bridge

Well, further progress in the short term will likely continue to be weather dependent, but I will say I've had to start making some more trees because although I thought I'd made more armatures than I thought I'd need, I realize I need more. More later.

A problem in composition

The mountain top observatory

As I was adding trees to the layout I came to realize that the sight lines they formed drew the viewer’s eye up to the mountain top, but upon arriving, there was nothing there to see. I couldn’t just add another tree or two, that would be rather anti-climatic. 

Sight lines lead to nothing to see at the mountain top

I gave this compositional problem some thought and decided to add a small observatory on the mountain top somewhere near where the tree sight lines met. The Mt. Lowe Railway had a large observatory along its right-of-way, so I thought some sort of observatory was a good addition: it solved a compositional problem, and introduced a feature I admired from the prototype. 

I built a close approximation in N-scale to the actual Mt. Lowe Observatory many years ago. At that time I was still in the dreaming stage about what a Mt. Lowe inspired layout would be. Back then I thought I’d land on N-scale, so, being intrigued by the observatory, I went ahead and built one.

I played with the idea of incorporating the N-scale one on this layout as part of some sort of forced perspective scheme, but the upshot was N scale was too small, and even HO seemed difficult to adopt. Eventually I figured I’d build an observatory in S similar in size and proportion to one of the small ones on the grounds of Ottawa’s Experimental Farm, but in Mt. Lowe style.

The Photo Equatorial Building at the Experimental Farm

The Farm ones are built from stone, but I thought something inspired by them in the Mt. Lowe white wood theme would be possible. At one time I was going to place one of these small observatories on the Centennial Experimental Farm layout, but after producing some HO scale drawings I thought they’d be too small and fiddly to build. In S scale though, a small observatory was quite doable.

The building was designed around the roof from the N-scale Mt. Lowe observatory

Composition in general is a topic I’ve been thinking quite a lot about lately along with light & shadow, impressionism, structure & construction, and streetcar potential. I’m considering exploring these topics here at the blog as they relate to my work. They’re becoming more important to me, and writing about them will help me understand them better.

Well, that’s for the future, let’s get back to the observatory.

I decided to build the S-scale observatory around the roof of the old N-scale one. In N, the roof fitted over a large telescope room, but in S it would cover a smaller structure whose size was more inline with the other structures on the layout. So, the old roof established the width of the building. The height was decided on by some trial-and-error until I settled on a dimension that looked right and didn't overshadow the other structures.

The 8 walls are laid out in a single, contiguous strip of Bristol board.

The building is quite simple as far as construction goes. The only slightly tricky part is laying out the walls so that the resulting octagonal footprint will allow the roof to sit on top. 

The building's 8 walls were laid out in a contiguous strip on a piece of Bristol board (much like was done with Cal's Cabbage Co.) in accordance with this formula:

wall width = radius of the roof dome / 1.307

For this model the radius of the roof dome is 1-1/4 inches, and after a little arithmetical handspring, the wall width works out to be 24.3 mm.

I should also note that the door opening is a scale 3' x 7', and the foundation is 3' tall. 

The floor was drawn on a scrap of Bristol board using a grade school compass trick.

The other possibly difficult piece is the floor, which was drawn on a piece of Bristol board using a compass trick I learned in grade school.

The wall strip was cut out and the wall divisions were scored with the back edge of an X-acto knife for folding. Along the inside top edge of the foundation, along the wall strip, some thick cardboard pieces were stuck in place to support the floor. The wall strip was then wrapped around the floor.

I should note I used 3M Transfer Tape for all 'gluing' as it's a dry method and doesn't distort the card as the pieces are being put together. It also bonds instantly so when putting together a slightly tricky structure like this one there's no fumbling around getting the structure together due to bonds that haven't set up. 

The wall wrapper gap is fixed by gluing a strip of paper along the inside.

Look at that gap :-( So, even after some careful work to get the dimensions right I still wound up with a small gap at the wall wrapper joint. It's likely due to approximation errors when laying out the wall strip and floor, not properly accounting for the thickness of the card, and 'squeezed' cardboard at the folds that distorted the pieces a little.

Regardless, it was easily corrected. I simply added a paper strip to close the gap. When it came time to panel the wall exteriors I adjusted the dimensions of the two walls bordering the gap by about 1mm. Once they were in place, and with trim glued on, the structure looks perfect and no gap is noticeable. I guess my advice here is: small errors are usually easily corrected and can be made to disappear. 

A thick cardboard stiffener was added to the inside upper edge.

The last step in building the underlying structure is to add a stiffener to the inside top. This provides support for the roof and turns the rather floppy telescope room into a rigid structure. The stiffener is cut from a piece of cardboard and is dimensioned to allow the roof to set easily on top.

From here on the remaining work is mainly decorative. 

Although the structural core is cardboard and paper, the exterior is styrene.

Textured styrene sheets were transfer taped to the cardboard core.

I used textured styrene sheets bonded to the exterior with transfer tape. That's another good use for this tape: sticking together dissimilar materials, especially card stock and styrene.

The foundation is surfaced with the same rocky sheet material I used on the structure at Inspiration Point to produce a family look between the two buildings. When it came to painting, I also painted this one to match the other.

The walls are covered with Evergreen Scale Models #2050 V-Groove.

Trim is strip styrene.

Wall trim is a mixture of 0.020"x0.060" and 0.020"x0.080" styrene strip stock glued to the panels with styrene glue.

The door is just a laminate of two pieces of 0.020" thick styrene scraps. Later a bent wire was added to simulate a door handle. 

Top edge cap cut from 0.020" thick styrene, edged with 0.040" square styrene strips.

The final styrene piece was a cap to fit over the top edge of the now panelled structure to neatly close off the top, and to provide a structure to hold the protruding bottom edge of the roof dome in place. 

Upper styrene cap in place; painted and weathered. Interior is painted khaki. 

The roof isn't glued in place, but has been left loose and removable so I can later add a telescope and let viewers see inside. I'm thinking of a telescope model along the lines of the one I built for the El Camino Estrella.

Now the sight lines lead to something.

After painting and a light weathering I spent sometime playing around positioning the observatory. I'm happy with the new feature and its location on the layout. It seems to take care of a visual dead spot in an interesting way that keeps to the overall spirit of the layout. 

Precariously balanced high above the Circular Bridge.

A piece of 0.100" thick styrene was cut for the structure's layout base - it's the white sliver under the observatory in the above photo. The base is attached to the mountain with a blob of Das. There's still work to be done to build out the mountain ground-forms to blend in the base. For now though it's solid and level, which is a good start.

From above the Granite Gate Pass

As well as blending the foundation into the mountain some extra details will be added to suggest an abandoned trail to the observatory. Probably a couple more trees will be added along with some overgrown vegetation. 

Although, when adding all these extra details I need to be mindful to keep the total height of the layout below 30" so it can be carried sideways through door frames! Right now it stands only 23" tall - so far, so good.

A tall tale about a small Flyer

If you had a chance to crack open the spring issue of Voie Libre - #121, for April / May / June 2025, that is - you no doubt came across an article called The Spumoni Flyer where the editor and I discuss the ins-and-outs of building a small self-propelled coach that's an homage to E. L. Moore. Here's a little extra for all you readers of 30Squares: a bit of fan-fiction in classic Moorian style to put you in a Moorian mood while you're building your own Moorian flyer:

Cousin Cal and the boys pulled my rickety Coach into the siding even later than usual last night. This time though Cal didn’t blame their extra lateness on hooch. It turns out the old 0-4-0 pulling it was on its last legs and stalled twice on the way back from the Red Eye Saloon. I was out by the track, waiting, dozing in my rocker under the moonlight when that clunker pulled in and woke me with a terrible racket. Cal jumped outta the loco’s cab and asked me, “Can you fix her just one more time? Please.” 

“I’ll do ya one better”, sez I. “I’ll build ya a brand new one. I gotta nice, new motor bogie all the way from France, and I’m just itchin’ to build somethin’ with it.”

“A new steamer?”, asks Cal.

“Nah, a new Flyer to match that them there Coach,” replies I pointing to the Coach the boys arrived in. 

Cal gave me one of his patented beady-eyed squints and asked, “What’s it gonna cost?”

“We’ll talk about that in the mornin’. Right now I’m getting to work.”

Later, much later, after you've pulled an all-nighter getting a start on the flyer:

It was a long, long night, but I got a good start on the chassis. When Cal wandered by I was dozing in my chair. 

“Hey, wake up! I’ve got ya lunch from Ma,” announced Cal and added, “Have you had breakfast?”

Cal handed me a big picnic basket whose delicious aroma could drive a man wild. I ripped into it like a starving wolf. “Thanks” was all I could mumble.

Now that I was distracted by coffee and savoury victuals Cal asked, “How much for the Flyer?”

In a moment of smoky bacon weakness I replied, “Consider it an early Christmas present”, and in a flash of coffee induced sense added, “but give me a couple of those Oom-pah records of yours I like.”

Later still, much, much later, once you've finished the flyer:

According to the dots and blots I stamped on the calendar it took me two weeks to build the Flyer. Some assemblies were tricky, but the French motor bogie worked great. I had just finished cleaning up the workshop and was leaning against the frame of its open door, staring at the Flyer over on the spur, when Cal walked up with a bag under his arm.

“Do ya got the keys for the Flyer?”, sez Cal.

“Do ya got my records?”, sez I.

Cal gave me the bag he was carrying and I gave him the Flyer’s keys. We exchanged thank-yous.

I opened the bag and there were the Oom-pah records. After glancing at the liner notes I looked up and saw Cal headed for the Flyer. I shouted after him, “Do you need the training wheels?”

On hiatus with the Clairtone Train

Design sketch of the Clairtone Train from The Art of Clairtone

Programming Note: Hiatus resumes. 

The hiatus is no longer on hiatus. Canoes to paddle. Bikes to ride. Lakes to swim. Paths to walk. Trains to see. And a stack of books to read. Especially this one I recently picked up: The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon 1958 - 1971, written by Nina Munk and Rachel Gotlieb, published in 2008. Clairtone was the originator and manufacturer of the legendary Project G hi-fi as well as a long line of audio and tv products. Among the fascinating things I’m learning was that sometime in either the late ‘60s or 1970 Clairtone had:

“A model showroom on rails, the Clairtone Train travelled right across Canada, bringing the company’s line of products to dealers in small towns. As a sales technique, the Clairtone Train was innovative. “It was about creating a ‘total experience’ for the buyers”, said Eleanor Brydone, then a staff designer with A. D. Pollard & Assoc., the firm that designed the showroom.”

I recommend this book for the photos alone, but I’ve got the summer to find out the whole story. 

Later. 

Stay cool.

Happy Canada Day!