Staining all round

Both the roof and the actual building are now stained, making it look less like a newly constructed building, and more like a dark woody coloured frame, although the outside parts will be covered in wooden boards.

What you can see in the next picture is not just a big mess (the stain melted away the styrofoam i sit my wood on, so using it creates nice long brown trenches), but several of what will become the wooden boards of the little shack that will be placed in my Newman and Port Hedland Iron Ore Railway. No, these are not scale 2" x 6" wooden boards or even 1" x 6" wooden boards, but paper, cut into thin strips and stained. These paper boards are what will cover the side of the little shed. They are stained now so that when they are viewed from the inside, it will not show their paper origin.

Little wooden removable roof

The frame of the removable roof is completed! All it took was plenty of patience, plenty of glue, and a camera, which i not only used to take the following pictures, but as a weight to hold the long bars of the roof in place. No, the camera was not simply plonked onto the little structure, but was placed onto a small nail which was balanced on the end of the long bars to hold it down while the glue dried.

Anyway, here is the progress:

The triangles and the long bars attached - you wouldn't believe how fiddly those triangles are!

Finally - placed on the house. It's far from perfect, but it'll do for a first time scratchbuilder!

I had to leave minor gaps on each end to ensure that the roof would be able to lift off without grading and catching on either side. Next: the wooden boards on the walls

Construction in (slow) progress

Yes, i am still working on the little speeder shed, just very slowly. Part of the removable roof has been completed. The scale 2" x 4" cross beams have been cut to length and glued into seven little triangles to place on the roof.

Cross beams measured to 3.5cm...

The 3.5 cm long hypotenuse to the triangle:

A triangle!

Then seven:

All ready to be made into the removable roof.

Plastered paper mountains

The plastering has been completed! But instead of using Woodland Scenics plaster cloth like i did for the rest of the mountains, i decided to save some money by using plaster of paris and paper towel.

I started with paper towels, dipped them in a watery mix of plaster and water, and spread them over the mountain shapes

You can see the road leading to the lookout clearly with the plaster cloth added:

You can see (in the picture below) that i covered the crack between the black fascia and the new unpainted fascia with plaster. This is to fill in the gap, any excess i can sand off later so that when i paint it, it looks just like one big board.

As you can see, there is plenty of excess plaster to clean up:

The next job: cleaning up the plaster

The Lay of the Land

This is the map of Newman - quite a modern town

The Great Northern Highway (in A4) leads to Port Hedland, where the sea is, and the destination for the iron ore. 

The road in C1 leads to the iron ore mine, and you could also see in that square the Radio Hill lookout.

Also on this map you can see a tiny built of the railway (in A1), leading southwest to the mine, and northeast towards Port Hedland.

As you can see, Newman has its own Golf course!

Newspaper and foam are stronger than you think...

The plan of my town (Newman) has developed significantly, and i would show you what it looked like, but i have the habit of making many changes to my plans...
But what have been doing is building a mountain as a separation between the scenic part of my layout and the town, to represent a long distant, or at least a separate area.
This involved a newspaper and foam build...

The shape of the mountain (sorry about the blurry mark in the middle, i think my camera accidently got wet and got some water in it):

 The cliff side:

Now the extended fascia:

A bit of mountain shaping took place to adjust to the fascia:

I decided that while i was adding mountains, i would also add the road that leads from my town to the radio hill lookout, that looks over Newman. Here is a picture of the view that you can see from the lookout:

Only problem is...i can't find any images whatsoever of the actual tower, so that i can model it, or even have an idea of how big it is. But in the meantime, i built the road leading up to it:

Although from the pictures it appears to be a whole lot of white tape, what i did was:
- measured and cut sections of flat foam at the right width and length.
- cut away part of the pre-existing mountain and fit the pieces in place to see how it looked.
- when happy with the locations and lengths of the pieces, they were glued and pinned in place.
- this is when the masking tape was applied to hold the pieces and cover gaps.
- newspaper was scrunched up and added to make the roads look like they were in natural locations, not just shoved into the side of the mountains.
- more masking tape and...its ready for plaster!

Cross Beams on the little wooden shed

I have been spending my time wondering how is the best way to have a removable roof on this wooden shed. I want it to be removable so that it will be much easy to insert inner details and (maybe) lighting. The cross beams and walls on each end would not be removable, but the ones in the middle would be. So to make the main house's structure nearly complete, i added these:

It looks like a house!

Next is the removable roof, and maybe the walls...

Hide-away desk

No - i have not been working on the mountains like i should be (i need to make plaster rocks to cover the mountains) but instead have added a useful sliding away desk, to help me have an extra workbench.
Here it is:

With stuff on it:

Hidden away!

It is measured at the same height as normal desks, so i can use it for drawing plans and writing on without having to reach up too high:

A look at the very simple insides. Instead of using another long strip of wood on top of the sliding draw to hold it down, i used simple square metal to support it:

 It works well but it needs painting in order to blend in with the black fascia.

The walls are up!

Finally all four walls are connecting, resembling something like a building!

First was a side wall, with studs scale 2" x 4" in size.

Then there was two...

And then the other two walls and the windows...

and here's the house!

The little Speeder Shed (or that's what its suppose to be...)

My first scratchbuilding project has begun - or had begun (a week ago) - in the form of a little speeder shed. My search for the instructions of how to scratchbuild a shed led me to a very useful website with the plans and instructions to build a speeder shed. This was the motivation I needed! I soon had the plans studied:

There are obviously no speeders on the iron ore train line in Western Australia, so I will use the shed for something else...

I ordered the wood from Black Bear Construction co as I had nothing so small lying around.

First is the scale 6"x8" bearers - cut to length with my Stanley knife and glued with PVA wood glue.

Then the scale 2"x6" joists are cut and glued in place (i used 2"x8" although it doesn't make a big difference)

Next the scale 2"x6" (again I used 2"x8") floorboards were glued in place - I used a pen lid to dab the glue where I wanted it (sorry about the bad pic)

This is the result of all of the floorboards attached - then the whole thing painted with Wattyl wood stain.

Scratch building ideas (There's a lot of falling down sheds out there)

While on holidays, i found quite a few run-down sheds, shacks and buildings that were obviously asking to be modeled. Unfortunately, I've never scratch built anything like a building in my life - so they had to be satisfied with simply being photographed for now.

You can never run out of ideas an inspiration - so feel free to model some of these:

I call it 'The little shed':

 If that's not your style, how about 'The Corrugated tank shed': 

and last but not least, the little 'Lean-To':