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Saturday, April 8, 2017

Building Guadalupe Fruit, Part 5

In the previous post, I showed completion of the truck loading dock for this industry, arranged in the structure as an inset area. (You can read that post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/03/building-guadalupe-fruit-part-4.html .) I didn’t show the assembled structure with the truck dock attached in place, so here is a view of that end of the building.


   Another missing part of the building at this point is the cornice or parapet, which hasn’t yet been installed. Although the building would look from street level as though it had a flat roof, most such structures in fact have sloped roofing, hidden behind the parapet. I may yet make this roof that way too, though that decision hasn’t been made. But for any roof decision, I needed to begin by building a decorative parapet, as was commonplace on older frame buildings. I wanted to keep this simple, but make a modestly decorative “cornice” look.
     My foundation material for the parapet was Evergreen styrene strip of the same thickness as the building walls, 0.040 inches. I chose a width of 0.188 inches, i.e. Evergreen strip no. 148. I decided that a cap strip would make it look more like a cornice, and chose scale 2 x 12-inch styrene strip., and to provide texture on the length of the cornice, I chose scale 4 x 4-inch strip (these are Evergreen nos. 8212 and 8404). Some 1 x 10 strip (no. 8110) was also chosen to make an overlapping strip with the building wall, to make a more secure glue joint when it was installed. The crude sketch below shows the cross-section I am trying to describe:


The building wall would connect as shown at the bottom of the sketch.
     The plan was to assemble these styrene pieces, then carefully fit all corners, then paint the darker gray of the trim color on the building. First, I assembled the strips with the usual styrene cement, leaving oversize material at each end of the four parapet pieces.


In this view, the 2 x 12 cap strip is toward the top of the photo.
     Next I cut and filed the ends to a suitable bevel that would allow them to match. As this structure has only two right-angle corners (see the post on its design at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-guadalupe-fruit-part-3.html ), this bevel fitting required frequent checking against the building itself. Here is one of the corners as beveled.


This beveling actually goes quickly and easily. The styrene strips making up the parapet are well welded to each other and can readily be cut or filed as a unit.
     Shown below is one of the parapet corners, as fitted, just held in place at one of the non-perpendicular corners of the building. You can see that this will pretty much work as desired.


     This structure is approaching completion. I have to paint and install the parapet, and get other details completed. I want to add a roof access structure and some vents, and some day I  may make a canopy for part of the rail loading dock. But I’m getting to where I want to be with this building.
Tony Thompson

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