Taking stock...

Tantalisingly, during my week of forced absence from the ether, my son brought round the remaining buildings I have which I have started over the years.  All 7mm scale.

These were all made for my lantern Yard set-piece.

I wanted to play around with corrugated iron and made a small press tool from styrene bits, located with some styrene tube.  This makes a scale sized sheet of Corrugated iron, or asbestos, dependent on the finish.  I use Chinese takeaway trays foil which is just thick enough to have some strength.

Just put the scale sheet, a little over width to account for the forming using up some width, in the tool and squeeze in the vice.

Paradoxically, having made flat sheets, I decided to make a much modified Nissen hut as the small car workshop and general mechanic's place, so had to curve the sheets.  Easily done over a curved form. Be gentle and it will take up a shape, without kinking, keeping it nicely.

High up windows necessary for the light needed to fix anything and everything.

Needless to say, like most mechanics, this guy started as a blacksmith and just spread his skills, the way of most country garages.

He does however, still do a fair bit of smithing and lives in the original smithy's cottage that he was born and raised in.

This is the cottage, with the brick and slated forge building an add-on to the side.  The back additions are so typical and based on a cottage in Upwell.  The kitchen is the first addition, brick, with a pantile roof and an old chimney coming up from where the washing copper was once installed, but now replaced with a small Raeburn cook-and-heat stove. Then, deciding that a grubby blacksmith/mechanic needed a bath that didn't always have to go on the living room floor in front of the fire, he added a blockwork bathroom, rendered, under a simple cement tile roof., with a second hand window frame, "relieved" from a building site in the nearby town.

The pantiles were made by bending two strips of thickish litho plate to act as a press, then cutting strips of thin card, soaking them in the steam from a kettle and laying them in between the plates and weighting them down.  When dry, the individual tiles are cut with scissors and laid from right to left, bottom to top.  Seems to have worked.  We all think we know what pantiles look like, but actually, they are rarely what you'd swear blind they are!  These are carefully measured from slipped tiles on a local semi-derelict building.