blog.jerm.ca

As devoted a fan I am of I.P. Engineering’s Ezee range, one thing I absolutely hate about them is the roofs. The stock roof supplied with each kit (that has a roof) is a sheet of styrene, about 2mm thick. Now I love styrene but the curve that this sheet has to be bent to is rather tight and the piece small. To date only one of my Ezee kits actually uses the supplied roof, the others I have substituted. My material of choice so far has been poster board. It’s cheap, easy to craft and sticks well. What it does not do well, though, is look like a roof. It looks like paper. Because, well, it is paper. To make matters worse, for some reason I just can not find any suitable colour of poster board. Everything around here is either stark white or impossibly black. There is no grey poster board to be found. None. Also it conforms a little too well to the roof line and warps over every defect making any imperfection plainly visible.

This past weekend I tried a new solution – thin basswood scored length wise to resemble planks. The wood already bent well to begin with but the scoring helped it even more. This was glued to the roof line and once dry, stained with a wood stain pen. The result is… not perfect, I would say, but in my estimation it’s a lot better than the paper. Yes, I’m well aware that in the attached photographs the roof doesn’t appear to be straight. This will be sorted out the next chance I get. On my first attempt I was a little too aggressive it seams with my scoring and I ended up cutting the roof right in half. I was able to salvage this but there is a slight gap between the two roof segments. I’ll probably take the design a step further and add a layer of painted tissue over top to represent canvas roofing. This will have the added benefit of covering up any mistakes such as the above.

The second big accomplishment this weekend is the completion of the first snow plow! W00t! It’s a simple assembly of wood, including scraps salvaged from the old water tower, and four nut/bolt/washer castings for superfluous detail. The entire assembly is “bolted” to the end of a HLW open wagon that has served as a test bed for various other projects. The entire vehicle ends up rather on the heavy end and should have no problem staying on the tracks. I haven’t tested it yet but I’m already seeing a flaw in the design. Two of them, actually. The first flaw is the geometry and position of the blade. I fear it’s too narrow and too far forward to clear the track adequately. Second problem is those castings. While they may look good, I wonder how long they’ll survive.