The Cupola Building - Part II

First thing this morning, I took the door frame that I built last night, fixed it to cardboard with a strip of double sided tape and took it out to the workshop to give it a shot of dark brown primer. (Since I have yet to build a spray both in my work area, I still have to do all my spraying outside.) Here we see the assembly back on the workbench after the primer had dried.

Here's a close-up of the finished head frame. It will receive some weathering and rust effects after it is installed in its home on the front of the finished building.

With that diversion taken and thoroughly enjoyed, I turned my attention to the Cupola Building walls. Taking the necessary dimensions from the plans I drew yesterday, I marked at the bench before taking another trip to the freezing workshop where I cut the walls on the band saw with a 1/8-inch 6 TPI blade, and gave them a quick edge sanding on the stationary belt sander before heading back into the warmth. Here we see the front elevation sections on the workbench ready for further processing.

  

 Next, I laid out the locations of the door and window openings and used a #80 drill in a pin vise to drill a hole at the coner of each opening to serve as a guide. I then took another quick run out to the workshop to cut out the three door openings on the band saw. In preparation for cutting the window openings, I drilled 3/8" hole with a spur bit in the drill press in the center of each of the window openings and then headed back inside.

The 3/8 holes I drilled served as an entry point for the hand operated sheet metal nibblers I used to cut the rough window openings. I find these nippers shown below, to be a much easier way to cut the openings than making numerous cuts with an Xacto blade or razor saw through the cats resin wall material.

After the openings were cut to slightly under size using the nibblers, I filed them to final size, test fitting each opening using one of the windows which will fit within them to be sure that they finished-out at the correct size. Below you will see the wall sections with the completed openings.

The last task for the day was to finish all edges by "carving" the stone patterns around the edges with a triangular diamond needle file so that the walls would have a more convincing appearance of three dimensional stone stone at all edges.

Bedtime!