With urban layouts, pavement areas take as more or more time than the structures themselves. Today was spent doing the photoshop work and installation of the rest of the 13th Avenue grade crossing. I also completed the foundation for the structure. I used 3/4″ pvc wood that my Dad planed down to 9/16″ to represent the typical scale four foot height of a loading dock.
I’m still in the mood to do some more work on the Downtown Spur so the next project will be the eye catching Domingo Produce structure on 13th Ave.
Mocking things up with a sheet of paper I’ve found I’ll be able to maintain the prototype dimensions on the south face. The north wall will have to be truncated slightly in order to fit (which won’t be that noticeable I don’t believe).
The Bond Plumbing Supply, quasi building flat is complete and “in the bag”. Very nondescript, it tucks into the corner of the Downtown Spur layout hardly drawing notice…..which was the goal. It also served the secondary purpose of kick starting me out of the builders slump we all go through.
We’ve all been there, the inevitable “rut” where you just can’t get motivated and have no momentum. In my case this frequently happens when there seems to be a fairly long laundry list of difficult projects standing in the way of any forward progress. Such is the case with the Brooklyn Terminal layout….hand laid turnouts, steam locomotives that have stopped behaving, you name it, one hurdle after another.
To snap myself out of it I look for something easy, anything that can marked as an achievement even at the smallest level. I put the BT layout aside for now and decided to go back to the Downtown Spur (Yes, it is still there!). An easy project is the nondescript Bond Plumbing Supply warehouse between 12th and 13th Avenues. This will be a quasi building flat….not as thick as a full structure but not wafer thin either.
To start, I built a core out of one of my favorite materials, PVC “wood” found in the dimensional lumber section of most big box lumber stores. The PVC is dimensionally stable, easy to cut, and accepts adhesives. I glued the PVC core together with MEK and tapped in a few panel board nails for good measure.
Next up is the photo wallpaper laminates. Since the structure is right next to the street, images were easily captured from Google Streetview and then cleaned up with the photo editors. I’m about half way through at this point. It’s nice to be able to make some progress on….SOMETHING!