Glad to be back at the workbench

After an eleven month hiatus battling lung cancer, I am glad to be back at my workbench playing with trains. The first project to regain whatever skills I may have - a row of scratch built company houses for the Copper Smelter employees.

 

I was coloring these company houses to reflect the way they look in the real world today, in which individuals now own the houses and have painted them to reflect their personal color choices. A couple of days after this photo was taken, it dawned on me that during the period I am modeling ,they would all have been painted in a similar color scheme which reflected company standards.

I have since disassembled them as much as possible, and am in the process of painting them all a nondescript beige color with the same maroon trim coloration as was used on all the smelter buildings.

The lumber hooker part 3

The rigging and railings were a labor of love - but the love affair has waned, and its time to move on to tracklaying and landscaping.

 

 

"Get a move on!"

After installing the backdrop, I spent the weekend continuing work on the freighter and a number of other small projects. The Forney brought the owner down to the smelter in his private car this afternoon to check out the work. He clearly doesn't feel I am making sufficient progress!

Let there be sky

The backdrop I ordered from the UK arrived today. I couldn't resist unrolling and temporarily taping it to the wall behind the smelter module. I took a quick run to the Big Box this evening and purchased a couple of sheets of luan so I can install it this weekend.

More ingots

After a full. evening casting and painting, the dock is filling up. Time to get back to working on the boat.

More ingots

I cast and painted another 30 copper ingot layers tonight and glued them up into 3-tier stacks. I have now completed somewhere between a half and one third of the ingot stacks required to effectively fill the dock and provide the impression that the output of the smelter is sufficient to warrant its existence.

  

Below are the three molds that I created and used in casting the ingot stacks. The first step was to make the single ingot mold at the left. I used this mold to cast four ingots which I then glued together to create the mold in the middle. Finally, I made four castings of this second mold to create the third mold. I considered making a mold of one of the three layer stacks, but felt that there would be too much under-cutting on the sides which would damage the mold when the castings were removed, so decided not to go that extra step.

Ingots I got

The whole reason for my Michigan Upper Peninsula copper smelter was to take the ore mined thousands of feet below the surface and smelt it into ingots for shipment to the industries down the lakes. Needing ingots to show being transported from the furnaces to the warehouse, stacked in the warehouse, on the dock and in the hold of the freighter, I started-out by carving a single ingot in styrene. I then made a mold and cast four duplicates in this mold and glued them together. I then made a second mold of this group of four and started casting them. Since I will need around a hundred of these sets, tonight I made a mold which produces four of sets at a time. Production will be ongoing for the next couple of evenings!

The photo below shows the standard manner in which the ingots will be stacked in the warehouse and on the docks. When finished, the dock will be covered with these stacks awaiting shipment.

 

 

In the photo below, we are looking into one of the open holds on the vessel which is tied up at the dock. You can see this hold is stacked high with ingots. Thankfully, since I am only modeling the vessel from the waterline up, I only needed two layers to make the hold appear as though it was stacked up to just below the deck.