Awesome detail. Can’t wait to see the finished light boxes. Something I’ve wanted to do for a few years.
Dennis Rayon said:
WOW Cliff as usual looking extraordinary awesome
Thanks very much Dennis, that means a lot!
Jon Radder said:
Awesome detail. Can’t wait to see the finished light boxes. Something I’ve wanted to do for a few years.
Much appreciated, Jon. Just so you know, the boxes are mostly made from scraps that originally came from you. (https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-laughing.gif)
Cliff Jennings said:
This past weekend I worked on the doors and windows, starting with Piper’s Opera House. After a bit of knifing away the primer where it pooled in opening corners, the window & door parts finally all inserted properly. Then came screwing on the window light boxes from behind…
… and gluing the frames to the light box from the front.
Also had to dremel away the primer from where I need to glue parts directly to the foam (yes, next time I’ll mask it!!) (https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-yell.gif)
Then I taped off the frames for a final round of black spray paint.
I could have done all the black spray paint at the same time, but I only realized I needed this area sprayed until this step. There’s little gaps between the frames and primed foam, and it would look really weird if light leaked out there. Anyway, here’s all the light boxes, ready for outfitting with curtains & stuff, and final installation.
Assembly of doors and windows themselves was fun, but I still need try to buff out some blemishes. These will all be glued directly to the foam.
I “stained” the balcony parts with spray paint, and then wiping it off. I let one represent a case of serious neglect…
I wrapped up with making some signs.
Except for the window box detailing, that’s about it. Mainly just painting ahead, and hopefully that’ll come the week. Oh, and all the rack-making, dirt moving, support blocks… OK, this’ll still be a while.
Thanks fer your continued interest,
===:> Cliffy
What accent color’s (note colors) are you going to choose? The base colors are fantastic !
Looking good Cliffy!
I was determined to get one of these flats done this weekend, figured it would be a breeze… Even more so since I took a half day off Friday to get a head start. So I picked the simplest building, and started with spray painting it a dark brown, with the plan being gently applying the light top coat. While that was drying, I opened my can of light tan, and to my shock and horror, it was baby diarrhea brown-green. It took over 3 weeks to get this mixed and shipped, si I needed a quick fix.
I picked out a light tan from Benjamin Moore’s online chart, called my local BM store (which is 5 minutes from my house). And within 15 minutes I was back home with a replacement can, yay! But it too was the identical BDBG! I’m figuring, I’m either going color blind, or this is related to that government takeover a friend of mine keeps banging on about, with a post-vaccine future where all our homes are colored baby diarrhea brown-green, but we only think it’s Sedona Sunset or Quaker Watermelon.
Saturday morning, I tried the paint out, and it was exactly as appetizing as I’ve described. But! BM helped me out. They put more pigment in, to get me a light brown that I can at least see using. And they let me come into the store and pick a chip for the light tan.
Resuming the paint job, I began carefully brushing on light diagonal strokes of the new (real) tan. But… it wouldn’t cooperate. Wanted to either run into the dark brown valleys, or gum up and resist flowing (this is exterior house paint, and doesn’t like a semi dry-brush approach like this). OK, so I tried to clean out the dark valleys after the fact with a toothpick + tiny piece of paper towel. That worked enough to move forward; but in the end, especially after the second tan coat end re-cleaning the dark valleys, it all looked like baby poo (sans green; metaphorically). My wife suggested just painting it all tan and not worry about it, but that would be giving up…
I had one more idea to try. I gobbed on a house paint dark brown, in a small section, and immediately tried to wipe it off with paper towel bits. It wanted to bond almost instantly, and wouldn’t wipe. BUT, with a light spray of Fantastic on the bit of towel, the dark brown did wipe off – and stay in the valleys. Not only that, I could control the amount of dark brown left behind, so that the light tan had a varying “patina” to it. This pic shows the failed state of affairs at the top left, and the new approach at the bottom left.
In the next batch of flats, I’ll try a spray version of the primer, so that the detail lines don’t fill up so much. That should make for crisper pinstriping. Here, my lines had a lot of variance in how they were filled, and therefore how crisp the paint was. The solution to this problem was easy though: I realized that the Knights of Pythias were, in 1880, not having their best raking in of member dues, and their meeting hall was slightly overdue for cosmetic maintenance. And voila, here’s the finished main paint job, perfectly emulating the somewhat harder times of the building’s owners (cough).
Lots of things happened today, including:
- final painting of the balcony (I’d missed some very visible areas which were way too white)
- replacement of the front white layers of the doors with a better-matching cream-color acrylic (which I “stained” in a similar manner as the facade)
- painting / “staining” the 3 upper window acrylic surrounds
- painting a few upper areas to balance the dark green of the doors / windows
- painting the boardwalk
- remaking the K of P sign (to better fit the space; the government HABS rendition seemed like a goofy shape to me now)
- brass door knobs (escutcheon pins)
- cementing all the door / /window / sign parts in place
- pinning the sign in place (more escutcheon pins)
Here’s the final result.
Wow! A fabulous building AND a Robin Williams routine, combined!!!
(https://www.largescalecentral.com/FileSharing/user_2480/VC%20Flats/20200419_153549%20-%20lr.jpg)
Looks great Cliff !
Were you planning to do any weathering to the balcony railings ?
Thanks Sean! It’s hard to see in that photo, but I did weather them with spray paint that was wiped & later sanded down some. So it’s like a building that’s still much in use, but in need of a new paint job.
Excellent work, Cliff…(http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
Andy Clarke said:
Excellent work, Cliff…(http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
Thanks, Andy!
Ouch! What a story dealing with paint. (Now you know how the rest of us feel! (https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-foot-in-mouth.gif))
What a great looking building!
Bruce Chandler said:
Ouch! What a story dealing with paint. (Now you know how the rest of us feel! (https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-foot-in-mouth.gif))
What a great looking building!
Haha! Thanks for the commiseration Bruce, and much obliged!
Rooster ’ said:
John Caughey said:
Wow, I don’t feel let down at all!
I’m thinking I’ll need to rename my layout as; Kiddie Land!(https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-embarassed.gif)
Don’t worry about it John. Before you know it them flats will be rundown by outlaws, hookers, booze and bullet holes! If not I can always take a drive down there this summer and fix them up for him. Besides they are already screaming a 4 or 5 color paint scheme on them. Let the man hang his curtains though!
Cliff Jennings said:
My wife suggested just painting it all tan and not worry about it
She has no balls but she can’t help that (YOU DO) !
No reason for not having a 5 color paint scheme here with focus on the accent colors !! You have the lines to follow !
Don’t forget to factor in the “shadows” when judicially selecting proper accent colors. The corbels expose this with the pics you have taken/posted .
Only adding my comment for those that strive for accuracy and demand nothing less.
Either way the flats looks “outstanding” and keep up the amazing work !
ʎssnd
well, your wife has a point there.
these are background flats. if you make them too perfect, everybody will look closely… and note the missing depth of the buildings.
make them too perfect, and they will distract attention from the foreground buildings.
just my dos centavos…
Cliff Jennings said:
Thanks Sean! It’s hard to see in that photo, but I did weather them with spray paint that was wiped & later sanded down some. So it’s like a building that’s still much in use, but in need of a new paint job.
Paint them light brown and dry brush with a rag with streaks and splotches, using an upward stroke …
What the heck, you’ve got oodles of time to kill…
Since one of the buildings in this row (and others later) needs a couple of lampposts, I started looking. Way too expensive for LGB / etc. (some were $40 each!), but I found a set of 8 for $16 on Ebay, and in a gas light style that I could live with Though touted as G scale, the described height was too short. And when they came in on Thursday, sure enough, way too short. But I thought I might be able to modify them for increased height. Another note, they’re fragile – so don’t expect much. But for my purposes here, they seem to be ok.
The elements of the post are just slid over a tube, with poor cement holding them in place. So I made up some brass lower posts (3/32 & 1/8 od tubes), painted those, drilled out the plastic lower base part for 1/8 tube, and epoxied the bits back together as follows.
Here’s the completed group.
The vendor gave no specs for the LED’s inside, only warned not to supply more than 3v. After a few emails with Greg Elmassian, and some tests with differing resistors, we came up with 820 ohm (for an individual lamp, run from 12vdc). Thanks Greg!
After that, and some annual mulching in the front yard (always something I pine away for), I got back to the flats. For the next (“Gerbetz”) building I decided to do a simple color scheme of grays, with whitish mortar between bricks. The overall light gray was applied in 2 coats on Saturday. This morning I did the mortar lines, in progressive sections, by over-coating with off-white and almost immediately dry-wiping with bits of paper towel, then gradually wiping more with paper towel bits spritzed with Fantasic.
This is the same method as the first building, but I’m raising it again because I’m really glad with how it works. With oil-based (e.g., spray) paint, wiping down with thinner or solvent doesn’t work gradually for me. Instead, when enough saturation happens, everything comes off (including prior coats). But this water-based house paint starts to kick almost immediately, but can be gradually taken off with the method I described, without disturbing lower layers that have had, say, 45 minutes to really set.
Anyway, the mortar and other detail lines were whitened pretty easily. There were 7 columns I was thinking of hand-painting, and I realized that would be painful and messy-looking. Instead, I used the same CAD linework to cut the columns from the same gray acrylic I used for the doors. I decided to bond the columns at top and bottom to the substrate, so needed to create little reservoirs for the cement with small spade bits.
I also left the new columns open in certain middle areas, and painted the foam black to show through those. Here’s how that started to look, with brass pins along the columns’ length.
The balcony color needed a re-think, and here it is installed but only with primer. Still need to top-coat that, and deal with the window boxes.
Cheers,
Cliff