It's just a sort of addiction really

The models on the couple of posts below are just for me and have been in gestation for years, but in the end I return to them.  Why?
I guess, when you come right down to it, the most common reason by far that people become model making professionals is because they take to it well at a young age and by practice they get quick enough to make it their living.  What this means is that it's a paying hobby, the ideal job. Consequently, there's no escaping it.  Give it up for something else if you will.  Find yourself in other circumstances for a while, or get sidelined into another interest or career path even, but you will always come back to model making, either as an intense interest or back again as a career, as I have done.  And as I know many have.
I spent a while living afloat and had no space for modelmaking, so I took up painting, but as soon as I was back on dry land, I looked at an old caravan in the garden and thought, "Hmm, workshop".

When I worked abroad as a clay modeller for the prototype car industry, the other guys had never heard of me.  It is a very small, close-knit industry and they couldn't understand how I could have worked in the field without their knowing me.  My answer was, "because I used to do this", showing them photos of previous models I'd made for clients, miniature ones in that case and that usually ended the conversation.

In all my modelmaking life I have never been asked to make any scenic models for anybody.  Odd, but that's how it is, so I have always kept scenery for me.  I like to go to great detail in my scenic work, experimenting and trying new ideas and I don't think anyone would want to pay for all those hours.

I don't mind, because this feeds my addiction and that, I think, is really what it is.

Heather Bell, in wood, for Lantern Yard

I started this a while back for the centre piece of Lantern Yard, my small canal based set-piece in 7mm scale.

This is Heather Bell, after we gave her a 2 week clean-up at Charity Dock, a filthy, rat-infested, but Grade 2 listed boatyard of immense character about 2 miles ahead of this picture, taken at Sutton Stop.

This is her during the War,

when her crew of Daphne March and her Mum trained many women to run boats in the absence of the menfolk, before being a boatman became a reserved occupation.  Here she is seen in Tardebigge Top lock on her way down the tortuous lock flight towards Worcester.  Shortly after this picture was taken she tied up and the ladies took tea with  Tom and Angela Rolt on their boat, Cressy.  Tom wrote NarrowBoat, the book that saved the canals.  He also started the Inland Waterways Association (and the VSCC and the Railway preservation movement!)
Some of those women went on to write about their experiences on and after Heather Bell.  It was reading those books that moved my wife to make a plea for us buying and living on her.

The model of a wooden boat should, in my view, be made of wood.  HB is no exception.  Having worked with my wife to end up putting three oak trees into her restoration, I know every inch of the full sized craft and so it will all be in the model.

I always use steamed pear to represent any wooden object in any scale. It is hard, stable and has little or no figure. It looks like mahogany in scale if you're doing varnished speedboats or miniature furniture and it works equally well at the much smaller scales used for scenic models.

The bottom boards of a narrow boat go across the craft and are tied together with the kelson, which goes from stem to sternpost.
The bottoms are slightly wedged in plan, so that they can be hammered up tight before fixing. They are left over-long and sawn off when the hull is finished.  They are 3"-4" elm.

At the stern, or starnend as boaters call it the huge engine beds are added and the stern post, rabetted to take the ends of the planks of the canoe shaped part called the swim. On the shape and length of this and the shape of the bows rests the handling of the boat.  Above the three plank depth of the swim is the counter of two planks which end in an elegant elliptical block of oak, weighing as much as 500 lb.  This I have propped up on spare blocks and made in 2 laminations of my thickest pear.

This will be only sporadic as I really must start earning a living!

Of greasers and caffs

Following on from my last post about model buildings, I thought I'd show progress on an old model I started years ago, in one end of a 10ft. caravan in which we lived whilst restoring our historic boat, Heather Bell.
Some evenings, it was just too foul to work outside, so I had a bash at a building that I wanted to site opposite Tony Moss's office, shown on the last post.
I was told by Tony all about the wonderful old cafe that used to share his garage site. It was a popular hang-out of the local bikers.  It seemed reasonable to assume that the lads had to get their bikes somewhere, so why not locally?

Being in a tiny caravan with no model equipment or materials and few tools I started this building using a fine-ish corrugated cardboard.  Later that week, I got my son to bring up some Slater's brick sheet that he had amongst all my modelmaking gear and glued it on with Evo-Stik.

Well, the boat work had to take precedence and the bike shop never got any further than a box, which was then stored in a damp shed and got stuff left on it.  I only found it last week whilst looking for something else and decided it was deserving of a resurrection.
Here it is as found, all bent and bowed with damp and failed solvent glue (a common problem with solvent, I have found).

Bowed to Hell,cobwebs, flies and a dead snail inside it, photographed as found.

The showroom window was bowed and the frame coming apart.  The carefully edged corners were splitting from the stress of the damp card.

Some serious coaxing and repairs needed here....enter a new material for me, foamboard!
My son had shown me some he uses at work and gave me a load to bring home.  It included some 1/8" which is my preferred thickness for model structures.  I used to use CS10 line board, because when I was technical illustrating it was de rigeur and very plentiful, but now it's almost a collectors' item thanks to the miserable march towards computerisation of the old arts.
It became clear that with a new vertical brace in wood inside the side wall and a carefully cut top and base in foamboard, I could get the warps out of this baby.

Add some gables and ridge boards and we were getting somewhere.

Old card window cills removed in favour of styrene, brickwork splits repaired and refilled with cellulose putty and we seem to be there shape-wise.
So, what's the 1mm foamboard like?

Absolutely fine!  Perfect for the roof, so on it went, leaving space for the overlap of the slates which will be done in my favourite way of thin card cut in strips and overlapped to make rows of slates.  That's for later.
The cills are replaced, windows repaired with new styrene trip and some new "glass".  Wall brace plates added, too.  The remaining warp in the walls is actually spot-on for the Fens. Anything put up 50 years ago or more is busy trying to come down again, anyway!  The showroom window is repaired, new glass put in and new framing added, just the Norton needs repainting, but the Triumph one was fine.

Having remade some of the windows with styrene strip, cut from sheet (I'm too mean to buy Microstrip!) I remembered that years ago, I had had some etches made of suitable stuff for buildings....window frames, doors, hinges, letter boxes and latch plates.  Along with some loco nameplates and numbers and four petrol pump sets of parts, measured from one lonely old pump in my village at that time.  The pumps will be used outside Tony's office building and the other bits will be used on this building where appropriate.

Here's all I have left of that etch as far as I can find.  In those much better days, I could draw all this with a pen four times bigger on said CS10 lineboard, crisp as you like, get two negs made, emulsion side down, right-reading, by my local printer for the price of a couple of pints in the Crown at lunchtime,and have them home in the afternoon to modify with Rubilith tape into one artwork for the front and one for the back of a sheet of etched brass (or stainless steel for my car and boat models) and get them off to the etchers, who, because I had given them camera-ready artwork, would just charge me about £18 for the etched fret of 10 thou brass, etc.  It was so easy and cheap. They'd get that back to me in around a week to 10 days.  Now, that same company wouldn't touch it, because it isn't a computer file, I don't want 100 done and even if I did, it would be 6 weeks.  You tell me where that nonsense is progress of any kind at all.

Raveloe and Lantern Yard...Setting the scene with models

I set this blog up a while ago to have my say without malicious forumites getting the wrong end of the stick, but would now like to add to it with my own personal model likes and dislikes, but mainly the work I do for myself as a relief from all the commission stuff.

I don't have the space for a full layout, so a lot of what I do will be for "layouts in the sky" or small, manageable set-pieces.  They are not dioramas as a diorama is a scene of false perspective to be viewed from a particular point. Anything else is a set-piece.  These set-pieces are to be Raveloe for the scene with the office below and Lantern Yard for the scene with our old historic narrowboat, Heather Bell as the centrepiece.  Both names are from the book, Silas Marner. I had to read it at school when I was 13 and have waited ever since to use them!

Although I think 7mm -1 foot to be a silly scale, it is the scale to which most of the model car patterns I've made have had to be done as that (1/43rd scale) is the one my customers wanted.
Now, with examples of many of those models being in my cupboard, it seems to make sense to use them, so my scenic modelling is also to 7mm scale...British O Gauge. Then I populate the models with vehicles I originally mastered, so the models will be still my work.

I like to model actual buildings if I can, or at least completely plausible approximations in the local style.

Tony Moss's office at Riverside garage, Upwell

I was first moved to a fascination with buildings when my Mum always encouraged that side of my model railway interests by buying me Superquick kits, which my Dad helped me build.  He even put lights in them for me!

The main influence on my desire to make the best models was seeing, as an 8 year old, the work of George Iliffe Stokes in a 1960 Railway Modeller.  It was called, "Does Your Railway Live?"  and was an absolute revelation to me.  In fact it was years before I realised that the pictures portrayed models at all!

At that time I didn't realise how these models were made or that George Stokes had written  a book about them, but I did become aware of a trio of books written by the other great influence of those days, John H. Ahern.  Ahern had built the Madder Valley Railway, the first truly scenic model railway, back in the late 30s/40s.  He then wrote three seminal works.  Miniature Locomotive Construction, Miniature Landscape Modelling and Miniature Building Construction.  It was this latter work that I took out of Collier Row Library so often they gave me the book!  It taught me how to make model buildings from cardboard.  I still use cardboard, although am now experimenting with foamboard to replace the card bits.  It was also full of the most marvellous drawings of everything from a Country Garage (another of my passions) to a Suburban Villa.

I also learned how to make locomotive models from this series and made several as a teenager.

I have finally secured a copy of Iliffe Stokes' book,  Buildings in Miniature, but am told I can't have it till Christmas!

There have been many books by modellers like Martyn Welch, George Taylor, Gordon and Maggie Gravett and various of the Friends of Pendon Museum about how to make model buildings, presumably using more modern materials, I don't know, I haven't read them, but if you have those above, you will never need another, but merely might WANT another.  Not the same thing at all.

I have seen a Martyn Welch layout and was very underwhelmed, since it was nothing more than a skilfully weathered collection of kit-built and ready to run stuff, but I have had the opportunity to look at a Gravett layout and chat on several occasions with both Gordon and Maggie and would suggest that if you want a more modern inspiration, look no further than these charming people.  How apt that George Stokes worked with his wife Doris, whilst Gordon works with Maggie.  It was a delight to me to realise that he had used a couple of white metal car models on his Ditchling layout, for which I had made the masters.  Gordon, I know has published works on buildings, trees and grasslands/earthworks and I'm sure they are full of wonders, but books are too expensive these days for me, so I leave you to spoil yourselves.  The fact is, though, that apart from the fad for electro-static grass application, there is unlikely to be anything in there which Messrs. Stokes and Ahern can't teach you.  In fact nobody, Gordon Gravett included, has yet made a better tree than George Stokes.  He, it was, who said, "you can't invent a tree".  How true.  Look at most model railways 60 years after George's fabulous trees first staggered an open mouthed public.  Ghastly, ill-modelled, poorly observedmis-shapen lollipops, every one of them.

This is unacceptable in an age where there are so many excellent materials that were unheard of in Stokes' day.

If Stokes could do this 60 years ago from Tiger Moth control cable, wire wool and dried tea grouts, so can we now!

If George could make buildings like this from Bristol Board and watercolours just after the War, why do people waste money on expensive kits that all look the same?

Ahern, too...

The little March

I was in March today, one time capital of the island of March, second only to the Isle of Ely.
It is a Fenland town, famous for its railway hub and its big new prison. The prison is built on what was once the second largest railway marshalling yard in Europe.  It contains 500 of Britain's most dangerous criminals.

But far more interesting to me is that the town has an almost perpetual 1950s feel.
I wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone looking like my Grandad with wavy hair and a shapeless suit got out of a black Ford Popular with a rexine shopping bag.

The tiny old Hippodrome Cinema, now a Witherspoons pub and coffee house (thankfully, no longer a scruffy Bingo parlour) is pure fifties.  The little independent shops, the quiet bustle, all are a pleasant past marked prospect.

The riverside makes a popular walk with leisure boat traffic constantly on what was once the course of the great River Nene, now re-cut to flow more readily to the sea via Wisbech.

Many independent shops proclaim their pride.

At the top of town, as at the top of this post is the beautiful cast iron memorial "cross", but in many parts of town you really could be be forgiven for thinking you are back 60 years.

The railway is a shadow of it's previous self, but still attracts many fans

And there are more styles of vernacular architecture than anywhere I know from mediaeval thatch to tiny wooden shack bungalows from between the Wars, suburban villas behind high walls, grander than usual council houses, tiny wooden barber's shops squeezed between a house and a Christian Bookshop.

All is here to see.  It is a scenic modelmaker's dream.

I strongly suggest you give it a look.

"The time has come", the Walrus said.

"To speak of mice and men".  Well, me and my Special, anyway.
As blog readers will remember, I am a Special fan and have been gathering bits for my own for some time, starting with a Cambridge Special Sports body.  Some time later I got an allegedly "late Ruby" chassis which turned out to be just about that.  All the rest was not late Ruby, but some earlier crap lashed on to it just to flog it.  However, I got a small refund and I've sold off some stuff I didn't need to the tune of £90, which is the right direction.

However, away from the increasingly snotty Austin 7 mob, I have received endless help and encouragement from the most excellent Imp Club and have joined them.  Through their very good offices, even before I was a member, I have been offered my dream engine, a real Coventry Climax one, a 745cc FWM of about 40 bhp, more than enough for an A7 frame.  More to the point this generous chap is giving me the engine free!
Now, I'd already bought a Sunbeam 928cc engine, thinking it was as close to a Coventry Climax engine as I'd ever get, being designed by them with Rootes help.  I also got a Sunbeam gearbox, but that will prove too long unless the tailshaft can be shortened and the tailshaft housing with it.  I have been told the "trials guys do it", but information is non-existent so far.   I do have a spare Reliant 850 gearbox which may have to be pressed into use.  Whatever happens the FWM WILL go in.

So, today, to see what I actually had, I laid it all out on the grass and here's what I have, sans the A7 frame, which is at the son's house.

Son-in-law holding it all upright as the wind here never stops!

This enabled me to see that the steel bulkhead and floor that came with the Bowdenex front suspension and that lovely shortened grille, were both narrower than the body I already had.  This can only be because they came from a gent who had a short wheelbase version.  Obviously on a tapered frame like the A7 one, a shorter wheelbase results in a narrower everything, by about 2" in this instance.  No matter, tonight I drilled out the ghastly pop rivets that held on the aluminium sheets to the bulkhead and can easily cut the steel parts in two and then weld in a strip, or even nut and bolt a box section honestly, to prevent any distortion appearing.  Widening the steel floor can be done by adding an inch of "sacrificial" wood either side twixt body and floor.  

Because my concern is that the Cambridge body should look as unmolested as possible I will concentrate on that element and then make the rest fit IT, not the other way round.

Side view:-

It looks like the FWM should fit OK. I was a little concerned about its height, being an OHC engine, but it looks like we'll be fine there. I believe it's a little smaller than the Sunbeam engine shown here.

Like Toad, I was at speed here, hence my mad hair, "Poop, poop!"

Per Ardua Ad Astra