Sullivan Ave. part III

A detail that I like adding to urban roads is the sewer manhole cover. We have two types in the image below; the Sanitary Sewer manhole (MH) cover and the Storm Drainage MH cover. The larger of the painted ones is for Storm Drainage. These are made by Vector Cut, and if you are wondering, yes they are a little large for HO scale. But the detail on these is SO GOOD, that I will forgive the maker for the size issue. The one piece of Laser Board has 6 manhole covers and 3 storm grates.

My challenge is to create a shallow hole in the road surface that is just large enough to fit the MH cover. I used the hole left in the Laser board as a carving stencil on the road.

Here is the tool I used for the carving. If you look closely you will see that the curved blade has a slightly angled tip. There is blade on the other end with a blade angled in the opposite direction.

And the finished product. If you remember a couple of posts back where I mentioned a pavement patch where I had to blend where the road was made of Wood Filler on one part and Styrene on another part. This is that patch, I deliberately painted it a different shade from the remainder of the road. I just looks like the Sewer Maintenance crew tore up the road and patched it when they were done. I have also begun adding cracks in the asphalt surface. Here I am drawing the cracks with a

.3 mm drafting pencil.

This last image shows how nicely  the MH cover fits into the hole I created.

502 Sullivan Avenue

502 is the address of the white house on this module. The kit is RIX #203 with a scratch built basement added. The house is set a little higher than the road which is very common in the prototype but seldom modeled. When I'm finished shaping the yard, it will have a short steep slope down to the sidewalk in the area near the driveway. I haven't yet decided if the driveway will be paved or gravel.

The window shutters are from Tichy # 8040. I thought I had a problem when I discovered that I didn't have enough space to add shutters to all the windows until I took a walk in the neighborhood where I realized that many houses have shutters on only a few windows. Nowadays shutters are only decorative anyway.

The side deck was made of Evergreen strip styrene 8410 (4"x 10") and 8606 (6"x 6") for the framing plus some scrap sheet for the decking. Tichy make some wonderful turned spindle porch rail, part # 8093 with matching stair rail #8213. The stairway will go down to the left and connect to the deck to the left of the single rear window. At this stage I have just completed the installation of the brick wall along the driveway. I still need to bring the ground back up to the edge of the concrete slab beneath the back deck. I also need a foam filler piece to complete the ground slope along the back of the house. Once the slope is complete I'll then cut the stairway to proper length and install it. 

To make the brick wall I cut pieces of scrap DPM wall sections, beveled the ends and notched the tops as needed.

Sullivan Ave. part II

Time for an update.
I've made a fair amount of progress with Sullivan Ave itself. In the image below I have it painted as well as the parking lot. There is a dark grey patch on the hill that disguises the seam between where the road is made of Elmers Wood Filler and plastic sheet.

I painted the road and the parking lot at the same time. Once all had dried a couple of days I masked off the road to make the darker asphalt for the Diner parking lot. The I lightly over-sprayed the parking lot with Rustolium black primer.

This closer view shows the area of the road that I made of sheet plastic. On the right side is a curb with a drainage flume directed toward the ditch. The brown rectangle on the left is a storm grate I drew in with colored markers (wait till the sidewalk is installed, it won't look so odd)

The cut stone wall is made of floor tile. A 12"x 12" piece was all of 87 cents.

The sidewalk is one piece of plastic. the brown strip with have fine ground foam for grass and some static grass also. All the expansion joints and cracks are drawn in with .005 pencil.

The road patch will be painted to look like a re-paving.

Sullivan Ave

I've started on a new module, I'm calling it Sullivan Avenue. It is only 2 feet long but 30 inches wide.
This little module will help me when using the waterfront module, and since I have most of the structures already constructed I decided to go ahead with the scenery. This will also be a nice diversion from the intense industrial scenery I've been working on for the last few years.

I asked my friend Joe Balint to build a wye switch with the track on this small module. Joe likes to use galvanized wood screws for soldering the rail at the edge of the module.

As you can see in the photo, the screw heads are quite obvious and will be a challenge to hide.

To help make the screw heads harder to see I cut away most of them as close to the rails as possible. Damaging the rail would be bad, so I had to limit how close I got with a cutting wheel on the Dremel.
I will add wood ties cut to fit around the remains of the screw heads to further hide them.

Next is the gluing of additional layers of insulation board. I like to use adhesive latex caulk for this.
Here the ties have been painted and I've even begun shaping some of the foam for where the roads will be located.

Another view from the front of the scene. There will be a road approaching from the left, intersecting the road that goes from the front edge to the back.

Here is a better view of what I'm trying to create. The main road that travels to the back of the scene will climb a short slope once it crosses the railroad, and curve to the right.

A birds eye view of our main road "Sullivan Ave". The cardboard square on the left, up the hill is the footprint for a RIX house kit that I want to place in that area. At this point I am also trying to resolve the parking lot arrangement for the diner. All to often modelers create parking areas (if at all) for businesses that are way to small. The end result the the scene look like a toy. If I can't make the diner and its parking layout in a believable way then it goes somewhere else.

Here is the house located further to the back with room for a driveway. This layout for the diner works better. It is not ideal but it is believable. the truck helps provide perspective on the necessary size of the parking area. Sullivan Ave also has been cut into the hillside and the drainage ditches along the railroad are also started.

The first coat of brown latex paint makes it easier to see the slope of the landform. I have the drainage ditches carved along the railroad and the driveway to the house has been cut into the hillside.

At this point I have glued down the thin plastic that will create the plug for the foundation of the gas station and the pump island. The foundation will fit down into the raised area.

Here is how it all fits. I will use Elmers wood filler to pave up to the plastic. Once it is painted and weathered, it will all blend in making the building look like it's mounted into the scene.

Paving of the asphalt areas has begun. I colored the wood filler with inexpensive gray acrylic paint. This way if it chips or cracks the light brown of the raw wood filler won't show.

Metro Concrete Company part VI

Well I forgot to take closeup photos of the storage silo so these images will have to do for now.

The image below shows the completed storage silo on the right with the mixing building on the left.

I placed the covered hoppers in the scene as a size reference.

I intend to add static grass to the green areas but because I haven't learned to use static grass yet I'll have to practice on something disposable first.

Metro Concrete Company Part V weathering - step 1

I have been taking my time with the weathering on this structure because there is a lot of detail to add. While the age and material of the structure are important when deciding how to weather the structure, the location and what it is used for can also be very important. This model represents a steel silo for powered cement storage. It would be a couple a decades old and probably repainted only once but is located very near saltwater (the harbor). So rust will be the primary weathering feature. This silo has rivets and lots of them. Just about every rivet head will have some rust on it and many will be so rusty the paint is completely gone.

The rivet heads are the most tedious part of the weathering. I could probably spend months adding rust (2 colors) to each rivet head and then adding a small vertical rust streak going down from each rivet, but I would likely be insane when I finished. So this will have to be good enough. 

The next step will be using rust colored powders to blend the rusty areas, When these photos were taken; I had already begun using the powders at the very bottom of the silo. (look at the very bottom row of rivets) Rust blending along the remainder of the structure and cement dust is next.

Metro Concrete Company part IV

I found nice decal stripes for locomotives and decided they would look good on the steel columns at the bottom of the structure.

I applied a little bit of a fade to the letters on this side.

I applied more of a fade on this side because it would face west by south west.