In the next couple of weeks

Have you visited

www.shortlinemodelers.com/

An online magazine format page I recomend. In the next couple of weeks I will be completing a tutorial on building our kits. It will feature “General wire and rope” It’s a small but fun kit that I created specially for the shortline modelers site and will only be available as a O scale download from them. I will cover resizing to Ho and S. I think you will all enjoy the kit and also the shortlime modelers web page.

Thom

Burger stand

Bill Laird, sent this and many more excellent detail shots of this excentric dive burger stand.  When I was a kid my dad would take me to a place just like this called Gus’s (Greasy Gus’s).

Well, I started making a kit from his photos and then forgot about it.  Untill now.  Here are some pix.

Thanks Bill.

Lost and found

I’ve been dealing with a hard drive crash the last few days.  Tthanks to multiple backups, nothing has been perminently lost, but reconstruction is no fun.  As you might imagine though, we have an extensive archive.  I ultimatly came across pictures I had forgotten about, or don’t have information for.  For instance, I found a partial kit design for a hamburger stand.

Here’s a mistery picture.  Any one want to take credit?

Kind of a kitbash from Weston Rodenizer

Even though this isn’t our kit, it shows what you can do when you take another manufacturer’s kit and modify it with our textures.

Weston Rodenizer of Halifax, NS shares these pix. He did some nice upgrading to a FG kit. I like the dingy. We have to make one of those.

This is the attached email that came with the pix.

After building the Fiddlers Green Fisherman’s Shack for my grandchildren to play with, I decided to try building it as a model for the railroad. This was my first attempt at cardstock modeling. I reduced the Fiddler’s Green kit to 80% and printed 3 times.  The build started with the Fiddler’s Green walls cut out and Clever Models Plywood with stud wall texture added to interior. Boarding from the textures disc was used for flooring. The exterior wood shingle walls were built up using strips of the Fiddler’s Green wall sliced and used to represent individual shingles.  Where shingles were removed, the wall was under laid with wood siding from the Clever Models Princeton Brewery freebie I had already printed off earlier.  The roof was overlaid with Clever Models boarding, tarpaper and red diamond shingles.  Windows were cut out to fit Grandt Line windows on hand. A Grandt Line stove pipe chimney was added, and signs downloaded from the internet.  About 4 hours time on the structure and another hour or so, on the base.  The dory is from the Fiddler’s Green kit and has additional strips overlaid to provide for lapping on the hull.  Weathering is dry brushing with acrylic craft paint.

As the model was installed on a base, it was entered as a diorama in the Maritime Federation of Model Railroaders 2012 convention in Halifax and did very well.  Now I will have to build a second copy as this one will be set aside as a memento.  Cardstock allows for easy modification, is inexpensive and gives very good results with moderate modeling skills and time.  Cardstock has allowed me to go from wanting to build models, to actually building, without concern for making a mistake on a $40 or more kit.

Thanks Clever Models. I now have several of your discs, but am enjoying using the basic New England kits from Fiddler’s Green as a foundation over which I apply your textures to build models and improve my modeling skills.

Weston