For some reason, my entry was duplicated. I just removed the redundant post. Before I talk about the boiler house, I have to share a ironic and annoying event. We have a hand made ceramic vase that we bought several years ago at the huge St. James Art Fair here in Louisville. Two years ago, I knocked it over and it just chipped the curly edge of the vase's top. I was able to reassemble and repaint the defect so it was effectively invisible. Fast forward to last week. My wife, while vacuuming, bumped the table the vase was sitting on and it fell to the floor. I didn't disintegrate. It just bumped that top edge again and broke away a different spot. This time, the fragments were basically dust. I'm very good at restoring china... I said that I could fix it, or at least try.
I thought that I could place tape under the lip and create a mold to reform the shape. I mixed 30 minute epoxy with micro balloons, and just filled the area.
I wasn't sure if this would reshape it correct, but it was worth the effort. And then...
I bumped it while it was on the workbench and it toppled over to the concrete floor and this time it disintegrated, EXCEPT FOR THE NECK AND TOP. That of course is the irony. So I decided to see if my idea worked anyway. Unfortunately, it DID. I could have restored that delicate edge and it would have been invisible. I'm good at matching color and providing a gloss surface. My wife wasn't very happy since it wouldn't have hurt as much if I couldn't have fixed it. Here's the remains of the vase with my excellent repair in progress. If you look closely you can see my previous repair which didn't break either. Go figure.
Now back to the boiler house. The nice thing about SketchUp is this. You can go from perspective projection to parallel projection and then choose specific views (top, front, side) which I then take screen prints of and voila, instant orthographic projection drawings that can be imported directly into Adobe Illustrator (or other vector drawing program) to create working drawings. Yesterday I showed the boiler I chose to populate the boiler house. Today I made the projections and put them into Illustrator and scaled them to 1:48 from which I can produce a real model.
I printed them out and took them to the shop. The boiler is exactly 2" o.d., the length is almost 20 scale feet, or 5 inches in 1:48. I put a view of the boiler inside a took a picture through the windows to get an idea of how it will look in the building.
I'll start building this after we return from an emergency trip back East. Our very closest friend has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and is doing very poorly.
I'm still waiting for the back wall, but it's been shipped. Meanwhile, I assembled the main and clerestory windows, and cut the clerestory glazing. When I come back I'll paint the windows. Here are 8 assembled windows. I glued the inner mullion frame to the outer using Formula 560 Canopy Glue. It's got good stick, not too viscous, and dries clear.
Next I clued the outer clerestory frame to the inner mullion frame. Again using canopy glue and applying it with my newly acquired dental probe. It's a perfect glue applicator and has nice balance. My dentist buys good American-made dentil instruments. What MicroMark sells is usually of Pakistani manufacture. It didn't take much glue to hold the frame together. I didn't want to a lot of cleanup. After gluing them together, I put a weight on top to cure them flat, and then used the Xacto to scrape the tiny amounts of glue that oozed out of the joint.
Just to see how they looked, I placed all the windows into their openings. Note how the stops hold the window face flush with the brick.
Laser cutting using laser board produces some beautifully thin mullions. I don't know how I could have created them this well any other way.
Lastly I cut all the mullions out of the scrap left over from cutting the main windows out of clear styrene sheet. I put these away safely until they're going to be installed... last. I sized the windows so they would fit inside the window stops because I didn't want the glazing thickness to push the windows further out of the opening.
The opening was measured with the digital caliper and that measurement was transferred to the Duplicutter. As I noted above, work will stop for about a week while we're away.
