foamcore_buildings_2.jpgSince my recent Lasik surgery, I have had to avoid dust which means that bench work construction went on hold. I recently picked up some foam core board from Michael’s and the holiday break gave me some time to mock-up some up the buildings in my town area including the sawmill and the engine house.

As I mentioned previously, I love the West Side Lumber company and have several of the plan sets from Russ Simpson for many of the Tuolumne buildings. Since I lost the battle of the basement space, I had to significantly scale the buildings down but I hope that my renditions still maintain the spirit of the West Side. The picture above is the Mill and New Engine House/Machine Shop Complex.

Some of the foam core mock ups will actually be used as the foundation for the strip wood construction that will follow. The Sawmill and Machine Shop will be built as strip wood over foam core. The Engine House will not though as I plan on having the doors open where the interior structure will be visible.

Having these mock ups have helped tremendously to visualize how the town area will layout and help to finalize the track plan in this area. I also played with several orientations of the Sawmill. It wasn’t until I completed the Engine House structure that I knew I liked this orientation the best.

The most time consuming part of the construction is marking and cutting out the windows. I had some Grandt Line windows on hand that I was able to use to make sure the openings were correct and the windows looked good.

foamcore_tools.jpg

Here are some of the tools that I used for construction:

  1. Self Healing Cutting Pad works great to save the knife blades and the bench top. I wish I had a larger one though.
  2. Blue Masking Tape to hold the structure together while the Goo sets.
  3. Walther’s Goo is fantastic stuff. Dries quick and has a nice contact cement action if you pull it apart and let it set for a minute or two.
  4. Steel 45 degree triangle to make sure everything is square.
  5. #2 X-Acto Knife is a little bit bigger than normal modeling #11 and it works well for the foam core.
  6. Model Railroad Steel Rule with markings for various scales. Perfect for cutting as well as transferring dimensions from various scales.