Continuing Saga …

Thanks! I have to find out specifically when it was razed. It would be nice to know and the model for the visitor's center should have some kind of plaque or information. 

Exercise day means short work session, but... it was fulfilling. I'm putting the roofing felt on the building (actually black construction paper). And two things really helped. I bought those good quality pinking shears at Michael's to make the saw-tooth flashing, and I now am the proud owner of an 8" Hold-n-Fold from the Small Tool Shop. I was able to apply really spiffy folds to the construction paper so the flashing fit nicely into the roof creases.

Here's a piece cut, and folded ready for installation. I'm using a combination of 3M spray adhesive for the bigger pieces, and the MicroMark PSA on the smaller pieces.

Here's that piece installed. Notice how cool the flashing (pinking shears cuts) looks. When the shingles are in place, all you'll see is the flashing extending up.

The roofing felt neatly covers all the gaps and ugly joints between parts and provides a great surface for the Rusty Stumps Victorian Shingles.

I was even able to put the flashing edge on the clerestory roof.

And here's an overview of the entire right side which is done. Tomorrow, I'll finish the roofing felt and then start shingling. That will take much longer, but will really make this building pop. If there are any gaps in the shingles all you'll see is "tar paper" underneath. Very prototypical.

I can almost smell the Bourbon...I have to start thinking about the site preparation and how I want to landscape this. There's a picket fence in front of the kitchen in the old photo. There's also that shed roof with a railroad track running under it. I haven't decided what I'm going to do about that yet. I was having the loading and unloading in the back.

Myles,

  Very sharp. I like the look of the pinking shears. Hope you have enough barrels to supply the demand once production begins! 

Tom

Barrels? I'm going to have to get a bunch of them. I have a few left over from some other kits, but they won't cut it.

I finished the roofing felt today, and then realized, "I'd better paint all the trim before shingling". If I slop paint of the roofing felt, big deal. If I do the same on the shingles, I'm in trouble.

As it were, what was supposed to be a long session turned into a pretty short one. My daughter bought my youngest grandson a Yamaha digital piano and asked me to come over and assemble the stand. He's a budding musician and wants to learn to play the piano. It's something my dad (who was a professional pianist when he was younger) wanted me to learn, but I was a smart aleck and only wanted to play guitar. Shows you what a kid knows... not much.

So I was only able to just paint the green trim. The concrete trim will be done tomorrow. I have to put in all the door thresholds too. And then it's shingles and doing the resin casting bit.

As you can see I did get green on the roof, but it won't matter. I have one more hole to add to the bottom plate. The wire from the kitchen lighting has to join up with the main building lighting circuit. I'm to drill a hole just below the hole you see in the junction area, and I'll fish the wire below the model to join the others. Regarding the parapet caps, I have to prepare them and pre-paint them before installation. There's simply too many chances to get paint on the brick work with them.

A long visit to the hobby shop killed a lot of my work time. I finished the trim painting and started shingling.

The painted caps highlight the brickwork.

I also measured, cut and painted all the parapet caps. I wanted to get these ready to install before shingling for the same reason that I wanted to paint the trim before shingling. The shingles are fragile.

I taped each piece to the painting board and airbrushed the ModelFlex concrete. I was getting low on paint so I added some Liquitex acrylic extender. I think it may be a mistake since when spraying I was getting some fisheyes where the paint was not adhering. The extender may not have been fully compatible with the Modelflex. 

It may need another coat of brush paint and then I'll shoot it with some Dullcoat. I'm going to install them before finishing the shingling, again for the same reason so If I get sloppy with the glue.

Here's was the first few courses of the shingles, which I'm going to stop until I get the parapet caps installed. 

Weekend here, no work till Monday. Next week we're out of town until after Labor Day, so you guys will have to find something else to read for a while.

Myles; progress looking fantastic. Have a good holiday weekend.

Ray,

All your time and effort payed off as you created a one of a kind fantastic building.

Alan Graziano

This is Museum-quality work!

Incredible!

Peter

Thanks gents! The 2nd iteration will be the best one since all the nonsense should be corrected. I'm anticipating the next build will take 1/3 less time to complete. It will be in a commercial location, so in addition to the building, I'm thinking about how it's to be presented. It should be on a some kind of podium with plexi cover. I'll get that picture laminated and possibly put together some kind of description. It truly will be in a museum of sorts.

Number 1 grandson was here overnight on Saturday, so he wanted to work a bit in the shop completing the destruction of that old Canon printer. When he's down there, so am I. I only spent about a half hour yesterday morning, but drilled the roof to accept the tall stack and big vent. I woke up thinking that I needed to locate these two before the shingles were done since drilling into the shingles would make a mess.

The 3/16" stack hole is 1" in and 1" offset from the roof edge and mid-wall respectively. The 1/4" vent hole is 1" in from the edge and 1.5" in from the end wall. 

I added a 1/4" piece of brass tubing into the vent which will serve as the resin sprue for casting and the mounting lug of the resin vent. I'm going to insert a telescoping piece of brass into the stack tubes which will serve as sprues, but will be cut off before mounting. Here's the two just place for fit.

I'm going to trace these locations and cut the shingles and tar paper so there's none under either unit. I want them glued solidly onto the substrate and not onto the paper covering. There will be some flashing under both of them to hide any irregularities. That's why G_d invented moldings. To cover sloppy workmanship.

Today's an exercise day, but I'm getting an early start and should have lots of time in the shop too.

Shingling is now underway in earnest. It's time consuming. I actually think you could shingle a real house in the same time it's taking to do this model. I think I have enough of the Rusty Stumps product to finish this model, but I'll need a lot more to do the next one. As I noted this morning, I trimmed the shingles around the stack openings. I also just realized what the "starter row" trim that I bought from R-S is for. It should be under that first row of shingles so they don't droop over the edge (as these are doing). I can't go back and add to this part of the roof, but I will be sure to add it on the rest of it.

Before continuing with the shingles I added the parapet caps. I bought some new glue to do this. It's Loctite's GO2 Glue. It's a silane based cement that is good for many surfaces. Since I was gluing styrene to Masonite I wanted something to do this. It's water-clear. I'm partial to Lactate since it's made by Henkel who is paying my retirement. When I took early retirement from Henkel in 2002, I was their global Chief Learning Officer. It's a great company and they treated me very well. The only drawback is low tack. It takes 5 minutes to not be re-positionable, 30 minutes to set, and 24 hours for full cure. In the time it took for me to do 2/3 of one roof, it was set up. I had to use some masking tape strips to stabilize it. I also used some strategically placed dabs of thin CA to keep thing where they needed to be.

No more raggedy looking wall tops. You can see where I trimmed the tar paper for the stacks. I then got into the shingling big time. Again, I trimmed it away from the stack openings. You need really sharp blades to cut and trim this shingle product.

It's three rows of straight shingles and three of fish scale. Of course I had to scrap a row of straight as I forgot to count and put on a 4th row of straight. I will be really ticked off, if I end up one row of straight shingles short.

You need to be precise when measuring and cutting the shingles around the edges and gables. It's been lucky that the rows ended up evenly under the dormers, and it works out with exactly a full or half shingle at all the edges. 

In the above, you can see how the edge shingles are drooping. I may try and slip a half height row of the starter material to keep them straight. The flashing looks pretty neat at the gable bases. I'm glad I thought about that. I'll have more working time tomorrow before we head out for the holidays.

I know how you feel. I did this little shed's roof using paper strips cut using pinking shears:

Took FOREVER, and I wasn't going for half the precision of your work.

We are all in awe.

It looks pretty good to me! And that's another use for those pinking shears I bought.

Is that Lionel Super-O track?

Yep.  Been a confirmed Super-O guy since Christmas morning 1957!  My original pieces are mixed in there somewhere on the layout. 

When I was about 16 (just started driving if I remember correctly), my buddy and I were hanging around the display layout at the LHS. A fellow asked us if we knew anything about setting up trains. "Yes" we answered. He was a very successful roofing company owner and had a 6 year-old daughter for whom he wanted to set up trains, but lacked the time. He paid my friend and I to build the layout, which we did over a few evenings. It was all brand new Super-O with a Santa Fe and something else which I don't remember. He was a nice guy, had a nice family, and paid us nicely. That was my only experience with that track. I believe it was 1962.

1962 would have been near the endgame. I can remember getting the catalogs every year and being more and more depressed watching Lionel slowly collapse. 1957 was the first year for Super-0. I was 5 years old and I can still remember that morning--got the top-of-the-line N&W 746 set that my parents couldn't really afford.  I still have the receipt somewhere showing that they bought it half-price ($49) on christmas eve at American Auto.  I still have every piece of that set, including the original box.

 Flashing is the first thing I see, if its there. I don't know why exactly.

Maybe from seeing it for days before exteriors were really done. 

 Is there a post devoted to your layout Pete? I've often spotted that Super O while looking at your photos. I also like the character I see in your work (or wouldn't have noticed that track as often as I seem to).

If you still "have to get around to that" let me know if you do. Please. 

Pete,

I also got my first train set on Christmas morning 1957. It too, was a Super O set. Mine was a berkshire set. I still have the complete set. 

I like the look of the drooping shingles at the edge. It adds to the realism and makes it look like the building wasn't recently shingled. 

Thanks for the kind words. I don't really have a "all in one place" report of my layout anywhere here. Been waiting for it to be "finished" (Hah!). But, you can find a great many scattered photos of the work by starting at my activity stream:

Avanti's Activity Stream

There is a slightly more coherent thread at the Yahoo! "Super-O" group, which is well worth joining if you are at all interested in Super-O (and even if you are not).

P.S. to Trainman:   Sorry for hijacking your wonderful thread.

Myles,

is looking good.

the mortar and green color use is a perfect combination.

I am happy that it is coming along so beautiful.

Andre.

You actually didn't hijack the thread since I was the one that asked "Was that Super-O track?"

I got half the roof complete. As I said yesterday, you could do a real roof in the time it's taking to do this little one.

I was able to carefully insert the starting strip under the previously done 1st row on the roof I completed. I was able to pry up the shingles far enough to get it under. At first I tried putting in a full-length strip, but that proved problematic. I cut the strip into thirds and was able to handle them better. I used some thin white glue to re-connect the shingles down to their new attachment. While it's not perfect, far from it, it did help stabilize that first row. Slate shingles don't droop. They break, not bend.

After finishing the first big roof, I did one of the gable roofs. I needed a really sharp #11 blade to trim the valley shingles without tearing or dragging them. I ended up using two knives. One for general cutting work and one just for trimming the shingles after installation. The blade has to be REALLY sharp. In this picture you can see the new way I'm installing the cap shingles. I'm using Rusty Stumps cap material, but cutting them to .3" each and then overlapping them about 3/64". It comes out looking pretty prototypical.

I did the front small roof and then the clerestory roof. I ended the session with the dormer roof, where again I used this "new" way of capping the shingles. With all these other roofs, I used a starter strip under the first shingle course.

This pic shows how I'm handling the top shingle course. I lay the row down, crease the excess over the roof peak and then trimming the excess with a new single-edged razor blade. You have to be careful in this step so you don't dig in a cut up shingles that shouldn't be.

Here's that small roof complete, and then a shot of the entire half roof that's now "weatherproof".

The discoloration is drying permanent fixative. I figure it might help hold everything down.

Since I couldn't help myself, here's the kitchen temporarily attached so I could admire it all.

As George Peppard of the "A-Team" used to say, "It's great to see a plan come together!"

The Rusty Stumps shingles are very nice; recently used several packs on a single building.

I use scalpels and small surgical scissors to cut mine.  I also used 0.005 copper foil for flashing and aged that bright metal with washes of ammonium acetate in dilute acetic acid,

Whenever I really need sharp, I have come to rely exclusively on single-edge razor blades. Always sharp and cheap enough to always use a fresh one.

More and more beautiful! fine art you do! like it!!!

Absolutely Gorgeous!  You do fantastic work.

Distilleries, like breweries, are found in odd places.  There is a restored wooden one

across from a restored water mill on a road north of Dayton, Ohio off of I-70, and

further north on I-75, the town of Troy has a museum to a distillery once in town that

mailed whisckey in bottles all over the country (this, obviously, prior to Prohibition).

Like finding an iron furnace in Colorado, I'd like to hear of and see photos of a distillery there, IF there ever was one?  There were plenty of breweries, including one

at Silverton, although I have never seen good photos of it.

If you want another Windows to Mac solution you might want to look into VMWare Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion). It is a "virtual machine" software for Mac such that you basically install a Windows computer running inside of your Mac. The two can communicate in many ways, even as easy as dragging files across the two desktops. There are other products like this, you might have also heard of Parallels for Mac. Even Apple has "Boot Camp" but in that you can't run Windows side-by-side, you have to shut down and choose to boot up to Windows or to Mac. We use VMWare at work and because of that experience I was drawn to Fusion. I use it to run my Windows machine containing my versions of both AnyRAIL and SCARM. Now to be fair I have a Mac Pro so I just leave it running all the time and just switch desktops with <CTRL> <left> but you can just as easy fire it up at-will. Fusion "suspends" the machine by locking it to the exact moment in time when you close, so it fires up faster than a boot-up the next time you open it, and catches itself up to the current date / time.

If I see an interesting SCARM file here in the forum, I just save it to the Mac and then drag it from the Mac to Windows to open up. Same thing the other way. if I want to show-off a layout on the forum, I build and save it in Windows and then drag the file to the Mac for posting. Oh sure, I could just as easily run a web browser in Windows and post it right from there, but why ruin a good thing?

Now this isn't free. The Fusion will set you back $80 and to make it easiest to install you will need to buy a full version of Windows something (about $100). If you have some licensed full copies of Windows something lying around, you can save some money, but it might get more complicated to get setup.

If your interested to learn more, just let me know.

Hi Trainman, I have not seen any post by you since this thread went off the track. I think it was good to document the steps as it has been two years for me since I built my model, and I was trying to remember how I did some of it and can't remember now.

Any progress? final position photos? what are you doing for whisky barrels?

We were away over Labor day weekend. And today's post will be a bit strange.

We flew from L'ville to Philly, rented a car and picked up friends and drove to Burlington, VT along beautiful lake Champlain. The town and region are beautiful! While walking along a nice bike path we rounded a corner and there was a roundhouse... well... not exactly round...only 7 stalls, but it's round-ish, has a working turntable and is a working repair facility for the Vermont Railroad. They were replacing a drive axle in a Blomberg truck. I took some stills and a movie doing this. I'm editing the movie now for inclusion on YouTube. There were a number of diesels in the yard and shop, all different colors and eras, and I took a movie of a moving engine. How much fun was that?

This is clearly, not the easiest way to install a new axle. In a big shop, the entire truck is maneuvered with and overhead crane. They were having trouble with the journal box being cocked at the wrong angle.

A working turntable with the other Blomberg sitting on it. This was a real working railroad, not a scenic museum. It used to be part of the Rutland.

The roundhouse was modernized with 'normal'-sized windows replacing the large industrial size that used to be there. The front had new siding on it hiding the original brick.

Some of these engines were running especially that GATX Power engine painted in UP colors. That's the one that went down the track as we walked further down the bike path past the yard.

It was a real bonus seeing this. That same day we took a guided boat ride around the lake area near Burlington, had refreshments at a lovely floating boat house, and had a great dinner that night.

On Sunday, we went out of Burlington to Shelburne, a town just south of the city, where we visited the Shelburne Museum. We saw this from the road on our way into Burlington. it looked interesting so we planned to see it. It was established by Electra Ward, an heiress to the Domino Sugar Fortune who married a Vanderbilt. She bought all the buildings and had them reassembled on the large property. She also bought this.

This is the lake steamer Ticonderoga in its entirety. It's 225 feet long and weighs 892 tons. It's lying in a depression in a meadow over 100 feet above lack level. When the ship was decommissioned in 1954, Electra had it moved to higher ground for $225,000. They build a special rail carriage to support the ship and moved it up a specially built railroad. They moved the track from the back to front as they progressed up one level to the next. The ship was then completely restored in all its splendor. It's a sight to behold.

It was built in 1904 and was a state-of-the-art side-wheeler. The paddles are feathering which means there's a cam that keeps the paddles vertical as a they enter and leave the  water and perpendicular to the line of travel when pushing. The walking-beam engine has one massive long-stroke piston, with and air pump to remove the spent steam back to the condenser where is generates some vacuum exerting more force to the crank.

With a single cylinder, the engine couldn't be stopped at the TDC or BDC or it would bind the crank. There was a crank position gauge on the wall so the engineer would stop travel when the piston was in mid-stroke so the engine could be restarted.

The dial on the wall is the crank position gauge.

On the roof is the beam. Really nice piece of machinery for us machinery lovers. It was able to do 18 knots.

The wood work in the ship was exceptional. It was the pride of the fleet. Folks would take the train from NYC to the bottom of Lake Champlain. It was then a day trip to Burlington, Plattsburgh and places north. There was only one class.

It had two fire-tube, horizontal, locomotive-style boilers that were hand fired. It was a ghastly job. It used anthracite pea coal, and lots of it. Ventilation in the boiler room was minimal, and in the summer, it was literally hell in that space. 

When we returned to the Delaware Valley, we spent the day in Lambertville, NY. There are some Victorian treasures in that river town and I took pictures of roof, gable and corbel designs for future reference. It was neat to see slate roofs in very similar design as I'm using on the distillery.

I had one shop day last week and started the left side roofing. I am definitely running out of roofing and made another order with Rusty Stumps.

On a completely other topic, on Thursday I'm at the super market and get a panic call from my wife, "There's water pouring into the master bath from the light fixture in the middle of the room!" I got home in a minute. The bathroom upstairs' floor was wet. I turned off the house main. I couldn't see where the water was coming from so I called a plumber who got there in about two hours. He quickly found the problem, which I should have seen. The nylon nut that holds the toilet feed line to the toilet fractured opening up that line. That's a $5 part!

Now, I'm telling you all this because of this fact. Whenever we go away for more than a day, I shut off the house water main valve. That pipe broke spontaneously. It could have broken on day one of our 7 day trip. If I didn't turn off the water, that line would have destroyed our home. It has happened on one house on our street and ServePro was there for a week. It also happened in our old neighborhood in Pennsy, and the entire 2nd floor collapsed. The house had to be gutted.

This can happened with toilet feeds and also washing machine hoses. They're bad enough when you're home, but when you're away, the results are catastrophic. So while it's a pain in the butt, it's really a nice insurance policy against disaster. Take a minute and turn off the water.

Tomorrow, I get some more work done.

Myles,

  Good stories. Thanks for sharing the pictures of your Vermont outing.

  As far as pipes/flooding, ever since the 1990's when my sister-in-law's washing machine's hose burst, I always use the armored water feed lines for the washing machine. Those rubber hoses only last so long! 

 Tom 

TCA had a convention in Burlington several years ago, and I visited Shelburne again

(had been there in the seventies), and some Vermont railroad covered bridges and

other covered bridges and water mills.  There is a photo high up on the wall or ceiling of the railroad station on Shelburne that shows an unusual steam coach (I photographed the photo, but it is blurry as there was poor light) that is on my to-build list, as are the Baldwin and Unit-Stanley steam coaches.  (the Shelburne one is much earlier and is the marriage of a steam loco and a coach)

Finding a roundhouse and a working turntable is no mean feat!

It wasn't hard to find... we just crashed right into it. The RR tracks go right across the walking paths leading to the lake front. At first I thought it was abandoned, but the rails were too shiny. I asked someone if it's an active RR and he said freights come through occasionally. As he was saying this I see the headlights of what looked like a GP9. It didn't quite reach where we were standing, and then reversed. As I looked down the tracks in that direction I saw the noses of the other engines in the yard. My wife and our friends do not share my fascination (obsession) with things that move and trains in particular so we didn't intend on getting close. But the walking path ran right next to the yard. Just lucky I guess.

In between interacting with Southwest Airlines as they attempted to find our bags that somehow didn't make it to Louisville when we did, I was back in the roofing business.

As you can see I'm closing in on the left side main roof. I have enough material to finish this roof, but will wait for my Rusty Stump shipment to get enough to finish the whole job. It's painstaking work. To trim the shingles at the ends, I let them be a bit long, press them into the corner, and then trim with a #11 blade. It has to be dead sharp. So to trim the pieces to length on my cutting board, I use the blade that was just in the handle that I'm using for the critical length trimming. As soon as that blade shows any dullness, I switch it to the other handle and put a new blade in the trimming handle.

Tomorrow is a work out day and I'll get some train work done too.

May be a little late to suggest this, but: 

One trick for speeding up the laying of shingles is to run whatever you are using as underlayment through a printer, printing guide lines the correct distance apart. Helps with keeping them straight and properly spaced.

That's a particularly brilliant suggestion. I wonder how it would look on black construction paper...I periodically use a small machinist's combination square to draw guidelines on the roof to make sure I'm not drifting off square too badly. It's critical to align the shingle strips carefully to just at the top of the cuts on the underlying row. I use the magnifying hood AND an LED headlight so I can see what I'm doing, especially since I'm working away from the direct lighting from the goose neck lamp over the workbench.

Shingles! I finished the left main roof and gable, and put the capping shingles on that work. I started the front left roof and promptly (and finally) ran out of fish scale shingles. My order from Rusty Stumps should be coming any day now.

I'm concerned that the self-stick on the cap shingles doesn't hold so well, but putting additional adhesive on them is asking for a mess. I might just do selective reinforcement on those shingles that are being difficult. 

To prepare the surface for the caps, I cut the upper edge of the top shingle course below the roof peak. 

And this is where work ended today.

You can see a few of the alignment guides I penciled in on the tar paper. It just keeps me honest. You can drift a little when laying down the strips and it can add up to big errors if you're not vigilant.

If the shingles don't arrive I will make the last vent and start doing the resin casting thing.

Back to a previous digression: On my August 14 post, I showed a picture of my friend Bryant Mitchell and I playing our Gibsons in our band, the Sounds and Sondettes at Michigan State in the mid 60s. I also said that it was a bucket list item for me to somehow replace that wonderful instrument that I sold for very little money in 1972. Well, dear readers, that bucket list item is now marked complete. 

With the help of Bryant locating a dealer in Eugene, OR, I have just purchase a 1995 model Gibson ES-175D. The guitar is stunning and has new frets for good playability. It's being prepared for shipment as I write this. My wife was very supportive in this, realizing that reaching age 70 means you need to proactively make good things happen or you can run out of time, energy, money or all three.

This is the instrument. The bird's eye maple is stunning.

This model has been made by Gibson continuously since 1949. It is the longest running production of any single model of musical instrument in the modern era. Steve Howe of Yes plays one which he's owned since he bought it in 1964. The lead guitar player of the The Roots, Jimmy Fallon's show band, has such an instrument too. BB King has played it, as had almost every jazz guitarist that ever lived.

Now the next thing up is to organize our 50th band reunion due up in 2017. All four of us guys are, so far, in great shape. We know where the girls are. Whether they'd be willing to travel to participate is anyone's guess. Honestly, none of us would have believed that 50 years after our last gig, we'd be talking about this.

This was the clipping from the Michigan State News paper. 

We played R&B, Motown, Memphis Soul, and a few British Group songs. Bryant and I both have our straps up high (like George Harrison and Steve Howe) which is a better position for playing, although not a hip as having it hung low.

And here was a "beauty" shot of me and that wonderful guitar. When I get the new one, I'm going to re-create that image only 50 or so years later. I still have that carnelian ring, only it doesn't fit so well. How do like the "Buddy Holly" glasses. I do some of his songs.

When I sold the guitar, I never realized the importance of having it. I'm glad I've lived long enough to be able to get it back.

To kill some time today, I made the second short stack so I can resin cast all of the stacks and vents in one mold. I had run out of 3/16" brass tubing and was going to resin cast one short one and use it to make the mold for both of them. I machined the cone top and CA'd it to the brass tube.

While doing this, my wife informed me that, "You've got mail." In this case, honest-to-goodness US Mail (not that AOL kind) and my Rusty Stumps shingles had arrived. So I was able to finish the roofing job (except for the cap shingles). It takes almost three packs of shingles to do this building. The roof has more surface area than I thought. SketchUp has the ability to accurately measure area, so I have to find out why I didn't get this right.

There is no color difference between the two sides, it's an aberration from the ceiling lights. The clerestory roof is the last peak that needs cap shingles. I had to go pickup grandson #2 at soccer practice. Next time, I'll finish that cap, and get into resin casting. Although I might build some downspout/gutters. This main building also has lots of those.

Here are a couple of a very similar shingle schemes on a Victorian houses in Lambertville, NJ.

Two Mansards, on flat the other convex. Both are shingled similarly. They seem to use four rows of each style shingle before repeating.

This is Lambertville's City Hall. It was a private Mansion in the late 1800s. This one has three styles of shingles. It's an art form!

The guitar is scheduled to arrive next Wednesday according to UPS tracking.

Some of the old shingle paterns are really neat.  Also, they used different colored shingles to make designs or the year the building was built among other things.  Yours is really looking nice!

Thanks Mark!

Rusty Stumps has other pattern shingles too. You really could do some of those even-more complicated designs. It would decrease the boredom of putting on row after row of the same thing. Twice today, ended up having to pull off an errant row of square shingles after realizing that I had just put on a fourth row of the same style. I was rushing!

I was just looking at photos from a friend and commented I like it except for all the phone lines in the shot. I guess you need to think about running phone lines, like in your photo, to make it look real.

I've got 6 telephone poles (so far, have to make more) so I'll be able to run some lines.

The shingles are done. I was getting some bad adhesion on the shingle caps I did the last few days. To prevent that from re-occurring I applied a thin layer of MicroMark PSA on the roof prior to application of the caps. I also noticed that some of the shingles didn't have complete adhesive on them so I added some PSA to them also.

I then went back and carefully added PSA under the caps that were lifting up. After a bit of setting time, I was able to re-set the caps and they held. Here's the roof completely shingled. 

I decided that I needed to finish up the wiring underneath and soldered the wires coming from the dormer to the rest of the cable. I then decided it was time to glue the kitchen to main building. I ran its wire through the two holes in the main building side.

Here's the cabling (so far) without the leads from the kitchen.

I'll cut relief on the mounting board so this cable has a place to sit without getting crushed. Due to the way the wiring went in, it wasn't possible to combine the wiring in the building. I suppose with some more pre-planning, I could bring the wires to a junction block in the building. It would be a bit neater, but this wiring will disappear under the building.

I then wanted to turn the remaining two door knobs. The machining went well. I carefully carried the pieces over to the building, got the tweezer on one, and then, "POOF"! Into the quantum rift it went. Seriously! I firmly believe that parts below a certain mass simply leave this universe and go to an alternate place. Sometimes they may come back. Others, they disappear for good. 

They're really little and therefore qualify for the quantum rift effect. There is a school of thought that speaks to quarks spontaneously appearing and disappearing into the vacuum of space. There is also a discussion about how much mass can experience quantum mechanic effects. I contend that parts this small fall into that world. Go ahead... prove me wrong. 

I've had very small photo etched parts fall straight down onto the work bench and disappear. Only to appear right in front of me the next day. And let me tell you, I searched for those parts thoroughly. They weren't to be found until they reappeared. This doorknob fell straight down to the cloth covering on my work surface... and then it was gone. Spooky!

Tomorrow's Saturday so no shop work. Monday will have me turning another door knob and getting into the resin casting. I've gone back to the "drawing board" and started to do more detail work on the boiler house.

Isn't it amazing how much time you can spend on the floor under your weorkbench with

a bright light, and nothing is to be found?