Mark, believe it or not, I still haven't received either my subscription copy or the author's copies, so other than the original PDF sent to me back in the beginning of November, I haven't seen Part 3 in print. I did get paid, so I can't complain too much. Their printer accidentally sent the wrong magazines to the wrong subscribers. I got an unsolicited copy of Railfan, which is also a White River Productions mag. And I thank you for your thoughtful review. You get an "A" on you book report.
And thanks to all the other fellas that have commented recently. It definitely keeps me going.
My persistence (not patience) was in full display today when I made a new roof that would fit better. Of course I measured the length from the wrong point and this second attempt was about 3/8's too short. I added a chunk of Masonite with a bit of lateral reinforcement with some thin ply and then cut it to the RIGHT length. I still needed a little added filler strip on the rear right corner so the side Mansard made full contact with the roof without any distortion. The roof forms a critical part of the support for both Mansard pieces.
And I finally figured out where the front Mansard roof piece actually goes. It took me three tries to get this right! The way I was previously going to glue it on put the front double-windowed gable way off center. It just wasn't right. I needed to move it right one wall thickness and then remove that same amount from its right end. I needed to add a filler piece on the left so that roof would lie flush all the way to the extremes. The arrow shows the added repair piece. Also, the oval windows now sort of line up with the windows below. I don't know why I had the hole cut in the sub-roof. It serves no purpose and I probably should fill it.
I explored the idea of loading the base and first floors from the bottom, but it really won't work for various reasons, so I to started constructing the interior since it has to go in before all the upper floors. It's going to be an art gallery and I'm probably going to plaster the walls with an eclectic mix of Edward Hopper paintings and PRR railroad art by Grif Teller. It's my gallery and I can put whatever art in it that I want.
I designed the partitions on SketchUp just to get an idea about fit. I made the aisle ways 5 scale feet wide. Each area will be illuminated. I made the partition height just a skoosh lower than the ceiling so they wouldn't interfere.
The let hand partition separates the stairway from the rest of the building. I'm making the left door access the 2nd floor. Unlike Nighthawks, this building does have enough room for inside stairs. I haven't provided any provision to get to the attic yet. I may or may not… depends on how I feel. If they're left as dark spaces, stairs are redundant. The front low wall is just sitting there for test. I still deciding whether or not to actually build a stair. I don't think I'm going to illuminate the 2nd floor.
All the partitions are held together with thin and medium CA. I used the corner clamps to hold the pieces for gluing, trying to be careful not to glue the clamp to the work piece. I had a left over Tichy door which I inserted in a cutout on that end piece. This is a door to a rest room and access to the back door of the building which I'm going to add at the rear corner of the big blank wall. The big partition is glued down, but the others are not…yet. I want to paint them, add flooring, and put the pictures on the wall before gluing them down. I am NOT going to use that checkered floor that I used in Nighthawks. I had just realized that the same checkered pattern is in Nighthawks, Saulenas, and the Chocolate Shoppe. It's also the floor in the boiler plant. This building should have Parquet. I have some that I used in the Victorian Train Station.
I traced these walls on the ceiling so I could lay down the circuit pattern for the LED lighting. I then put the copper in place and cut the circuit gaps where the LEDs will be soldered. I'll do this tomorrow. The arrows show the circuit cuts. I wanted to limit the LEDs to 4 since I'm using a 12VDC source with a CL2N LED driver. Each LED drops 3 volts. The strip without the light is facing the big windows.
Some other news: I wanted to get some small 1:48 major home appliances 3D printed by Rusty Stumps. I want to use them to populate an appliance store for the one building that I bought complete. I already have the neon Miller Engineering Zenith sign. I downloaded an array of appliances from the SketchUp 3D warehouse and sized them to 1:48 and sent them to Walt Gillespie. Well… the drawings were not done well and needed a lot of fixing before they could be printed. Walt uses a laser resin system which produces very fine high res output. After we got all the drawing fixed, he let me know what it was going to cost. A fortune! It was going to cost a fortune! The resin is $175 a liter and O'scale appliances are actually bigger than you think when you printing 30 of them. I ended up killing the deal and he's going to see if a friend can do them on a filament printer. I may check with Shapeways also. Then there's plan C: making them out of styrene by hand. I previously had downloaded and sized a bunch of Google-searched images that I could use as facings for handmade blocks and I might still do that.
Next: I'm putting the finishing touches on an article about Nighthawks. Like Bernheim, Nighthawks presented some new techniques and learnings so it could be a nice article.
