04-27-2015, 09:25 PM
Thanks, guys.
I was undecided about how to add the floor: either place the tracks directly on the plywood layout and build the floor around them, or put the tracks atop some sort of floor. The latter option allowed me to screw the wall sections to the floor, giving the whole assembly more stiffness, an important consideration since it's doing a lot of travelling between the layout and the shop while construction proceeds. This meant that the tracks had to be cemented to that subfloor, and I opted to put them in each as one length of track from the turntable to the back wall of the roundhouse. Since the structure, even without the tracks, wouldn't have fit into my paint booth, making the tracks part of the building doesn't change much, at least construction-wise. Adding the layer of balsa increased the stiffness and I'm sure that the final layer of styrene floor will only increase that.
Because the screw heads joining the corners together have to be filled, the exterior will get a coat of rattle can grey primer. I'll probably do the interior walls and columns, along with the roof trusses, in two-tone grey, but I don't plan on an overly-detailed interior and there'll definitely be no lights.
Once the floor is done, I'll continue with the interior supports and roof trusses. These won't necessarily be strictly to-scale (the original wood from the kit, to be used for posts and trusses, scaled-out at close to 2'x2'
) but I hope to make them look plausible and properly engineered. My "plan" is to make the supports (posts and trusses) from front wall to rear as part of the building, but make the crossmembers supporting the roof as part of the roof - this should keep the one-piece roof from deforming too much if it needs to be lifted off for any reason. We'll see, though, how that develops. Like most of my kitbashing and scratchbuilding projects, I have a rough idea on how to do things, but sometimes see a better (or occasionally worse 
) way of acomplishing things as it takes shape.
Wayne
I was undecided about how to add the floor: either place the tracks directly on the plywood layout and build the floor around them, or put the tracks atop some sort of floor. The latter option allowed me to screw the wall sections to the floor, giving the whole assembly more stiffness, an important consideration since it's doing a lot of travelling between the layout and the shop while construction proceeds. This meant that the tracks had to be cemented to that subfloor, and I opted to put them in each as one length of track from the turntable to the back wall of the roundhouse. Since the structure, even without the tracks, wouldn't have fit into my paint booth, making the tracks part of the building doesn't change much, at least construction-wise. Adding the layer of balsa increased the stiffness and I'm sure that the final layer of styrene floor will only increase that.
Because the screw heads joining the corners together have to be filled, the exterior will get a coat of rattle can grey primer. I'll probably do the interior walls and columns, along with the roof trusses, in two-tone grey, but I don't plan on an overly-detailed interior and there'll definitely be no lights.
Once the floor is done, I'll continue with the interior supports and roof trusses. These won't necessarily be strictly to-scale (the original wood from the kit, to be used for posts and trusses, scaled-out at close to 2'x2'
) but I hope to make them look plausible and properly engineered. My "plan" is to make the supports (posts and trusses) from front wall to rear as part of the building, but make the crossmembers supporting the roof as part of the roof - this should keep the one-piece roof from deforming too much if it needs to be lifted off for any reason. We'll see, though, how that develops. Like most of my kitbashing and scratchbuilding projects, I have a rough idea on how to do things, but sometimes see a better (or occasionally worse ) way of acomplishing things as it takes shape.Wayne