100 and still going!

No, not my age, although my body does appear to think it must be that age on occasions when I ache after completing a Mrs W 'must be done' task! This is my 100th post! I did my first post back in June 2020 and then did nothing more until the start of this year and since then I have averaged 10 posts a month. When I started this blog there was always a strong possibility that I would do a few posts and it would then get forgotten about in my characteristic way. However I have persevered and the blog is in effect my record of what I have done and will hopefully continue to do. It is interesting for me to look back through the posts sometimes just to get a sense of what I have done and when. I am not going to go into a deep statistical and philosophical roundup of  the various things done apart from summerising it as 'Could do better!' but then that is always the case.

Back to reality now and it has been a busy few days. 

Thursday saw me heading into Rutland for another day of volunteering at the Rocks By Rail Museum. The task in hand was to start cutting back vegetation close to the running line. The track is only 3/4 of a mile long but when you have to walk all the way down it, as we are starting at the furthest point and working back, and then back for lunch, and then do the whole journey again after lunch you begin to feel it on your legs. However it was a good excuse for a piece of cake at lunchtime without too much of a guilt trip about calories! It was just Richard, his dog Riley who likes to dig grass up and myself but it was a nice warm day and we had a great time. As the pictures show the vegetation has not been cut back for years and given that we managed about a 40 foot length of cutting back this is going to be a long project! 

At the start of the day....

At the end of the day...... There is a long way to go!

Mr Beecham came round on Friday. As a fellow modeler he always has something to show me from his continuingly growing collection of quality models that he builds. Stupidly I forgot to take some photos but he had a very nice 1/35 scale Chinese tank transporter and a stunning 1/48 scale Lancaster bomber. Interestingly he also had a Superquick 1/76 scale row of terrace houses with him which he casually knocked up over a few evenings recently. Yes! He can knock up an entire terrace of houses whilst in the same time I can just about fit the windows for one house! I think I need to up my game on production of models! 

We also went for a 16 mile bike ride which may not be far but given the strength of the headwind for the first 8 miles and the various hills that we climbed (Mr Motorlegs Beecham left me a distant second on those) it felt further. We did stop on the way round for a sausage cob and a drink which aided us by adding weight so that gravity could assist us even more on the downhill stretch of the journey home. That's my excuse anyway! Whilst eating our cobs I was quite taken by the Halloween tractor on display.

This sign also brought a smile to my face and yes, they are right and something that we should all remember.

Model wise not a lot to report apart from having fitted most of the windows to the Dapol General Store. Maybe I need to give my kits to Mr Beecham to build if I am to make some better progress over the next 100 posts!

Getting slated or is it curtains for me?

In this case this is not about me getting criticised or slated as the saying goes but it is about the roof of the Dapol General Store. The roof was sprayed in a light slate coloured grey which looked very boring and mono tone. Look at any roof and it will have variations in colour both from the material used and the aging process. The slates on this building needed some variation so putting three dabs of light grey, dark grey and white on a paint top I spent half an hour listening to the Budget roundup - no tax relief on model kits and model railways then - randomly mixing various hues of grey and picking out individual tiles until I was happy with the look. There is no art to it - its completely random just like my brain! Once dry I toned it all down with a wash of diluted black paint which would also highlight the gaps between the tiles.

It looks a bit of a mess when you first apply the wash but leave it alone for a while and do something else - I thought about Mrs Woody's list of jobs for me to do - and once its dry it will look fine.

Whilst I was waiting for the paint to dry and having thought about the list for a few seconds I turned my attention to the window frames which is going to lead onto the curtain bit of the post title. The kit comes with a sheet of acetate to glaze the windows. Mine actually came with two - maybe Dapol are giving you the opportunity to double glaze your windows??? Anyway I settled for one sheet. I glued the frame to the acetate with UHU glue. Super glue or plastic glue will just cloud the acetate. Once glued and cut to size the next thing was making the General Store look lived in and that means curtains in the windows. If you look at some models that modellers build of houses they have fantastic patterned curtains facing the window and it looks very grand from outside. However if you lived in the house you would be looking at the back of the curtain which would usually be a backing sheet in white or some other mono colour. So I at least avoided the mistake of having my curtains facing the outside by painting the curtain backing direct to the glazing. Saves cutting bits of paper which have to be glued in position and then fall off once the building is sealed up and all the issues that causes. The pictures below show what I mean.

Looks a bit rough from the back but turn the window frame over and...

Put them in the building and it looks even better....

Slowly getting there and it will be nice when I am able to draw the curtains on this build which is a pun I will probably get slated for!

Bricking it!

No! I am not in fear (for those outside the UK there is an online description of the phrase here ) although I may be later on if I don't get Mrs Woody's list of jobs finished! Bricking it in this case is related to the Dapol General Store where I have amongst other things painted the brick work. The windows, doors and roof have also been painted.

The painting started with what was a fairly vivid red although it was my personal mix from Vallejo Earth Brown, Orange and Red but it did not finish the shade I thought it would. Lesson to be learnt here - never trust me to mix anything as Mrs W has already learnt from one or two kitchen related incidents. Enough said! Back to the red paint. Never mind there are other things that would be done to it to tone it down.

This is what it looked like looking almost Post Office Red. However a caot of Earth Brown mixed with some Light Grey was gently wafted from a distance so that it dusted rather than painted the surface which still allowed that red base coat to be seen but through a opaque shading colour - nice!

At the moment I am adding washes of very dilute grey to highlight the mortar courses. The relief in the casting of the building is not very deep which is causing some issues and was the main reason that I did not use my usual way of colouring bricks with coloured pencils. However the picture below shows the concrete window cills have been painted in and one window frame is temporarily in along with the roof  to give an idea of how the building will eventually look. Now where is that list of jobs.........

Back on the Chain Gang!

Well on Thursday it felt a bit like being part of one of those old films set in an American prison where the inmates were breaking rocks as part of their punishment. Whilst it may have been hard work digging out ballast from between sleepers at the Rocks by Rail Museum, it was far from punishment. I enjoy a bit of digging and it was a nice sunny day surrounded by railway infrastructure and rolling stock and some good guys with some great chat as well as Riley the dog, who prefers to dig up grass rather than ballast - pity!

What could be better? I even got home in time to put Mrs W's dinner on the table as she arrived home - result! 

Over the weekend I have managed to make some progress with the various buildings for the narrow gauge layout. The Dapol General store has been primed ready for its final paint scheme. There were some gaps in the joints at the corners of the walls that required filling. To cut down on the mess and subsequent cleaning and sanding I ran a strip of masking tape either side of the gaps. 

Vallejo acrylic putty was then brushed into the gaps and left to dry.

The masking tape was then removed leaving a nice clean joint that needed little more then me running a finger nail down it to remove a few rough bits. Working smarter not harder as I get older!

If you look at some model buildings on railway layouts you will notice that you can look straight through a window to the other side of the building and through the opposite window. Whilst open plan living may be a concept some like it is not something that you see in many buildings and at some point there are internal walls even if only to separate the sanitary facilities from the rest of the house. I have added several partitions into the shell of the building as well as a first floor floor - if that makes sense! Not only do these block the view through the building but they also add a bit of additional strength. I am not going to add internal detail but I think these partitions will do a good job in adding that extra realism to the model.

All the parts have now been primed in a light grey awaiting their final paint scheme.

I have also glued the walls of the Service Station together and cleaned up some of the other parts which now await their turn to be primed which hopefully may get done tomorrow if Mrs W doesn't introduce here own version of a Chain Gang to get me to finish that list of jobs!

Fueling around - What a Weekend!

For those in the UK this weekend for many was taken up by the new past time of 'Find the Fuel' and that is fuel not fool. If you were actually looking for the fool you would have come to the right place reading this blog authored by a fool! However, back to the story. Mrs Woody's car was almost on empty and needing two thirds of a tank of diesel a week for work she needed fuel. No problem. At least one filling station near us would have some I proclaimed just like a fool. In a 15 mile radius we ended up trying 13 locations. At one we came within getting three cars away from the remaining pump before it ran dry. The last place we tried actually had some fuel - at £1.59 a liter! In normal circumstances I would have driven away to find somewhere a little more economical but needs must. At least Mrs Woody was happy even if my wallet was not! 

Strangely enough my plan developed several years ago for my 009 narrow gauge layout has always had a service station as one of the buildings to be included. The service station will be definitely 1960s when petrol was plentiful, costing 3 and 6 a gallon (not like the £1.59 a liter I paid on Sunday), when you got quadruple green shield stamps, tokens towards the real genuine plastic beaker set and all served to you by an attendant who filled the car up and checked the tyres! Those of younger years will be scratching their heads but that was how it worked back then! 

Anyway as I could sit more comfortably Sunday evening as my back pocket no longer contained a fat wallet but a much slimmed down version after paying for fuel, I took the opportunity to start on getting the various buildings together and placing them on the layout to get a feel for how they looked and where the other scenic items such as the road would fit. 

The first two buildings are the Dapol General Store and Service Station kits. 

The kits were originally produced in the late 50's early 60's by Kitmaster before becoming part of the Airfix range. Dapol then took on the moulds and have produced the entire original range as well as adding a few new ones. The kits are fairly basic but as my layout is set in that 50's/60's period the character of the buildings is just right. For moulds that are well over 50 years old now the parts are still coming out well with just a few areas where there is some flash that needs to be trimmed away.

The kits have been semi assembles with a mixture of glue and masking tape - I just need the basic building shell so that I can see the effect that each building will have. Full construction will come later. One thing I will highlight is that when gluing it is important to get parts square. When gluing the walls of the General Store together I looked for my set square but in my chaotic area of a workbench I could not find it. The next best thing was to use part of the roof moulding as that would be a right angel - sometimes you have to think outside of the box or in this case, as the kit came in a bag, outside of that!

Having got the basic structures together they are at the moment placed like this.

More buildings to come but I am getting a better sense of whether what I have planned for many years will actually work in reality or have I just been a fool!