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Wednesday, March 11, 2020

Building the AL&W power house, Part 2

The first part of this discussion was about the AL&W Lines kit for a Southern Pacific power house (kit SP 21). I prepainted the building parts and did the basic assembly of the structure in that segment (you can read the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/02/building-al-sp-power-house.html ). Now I want to complete the structure.
     With the basic building completed, the rooftop cupola needed to be built. It is put together much like the rest of the main structure, with peel-and-stick trim added to the bare cupola. I used the slots in the main roof as guides in assembling the cupola, but didn’t glue the cupola to the roof at this point.


     The kit has an interesting roofing material, styrene sheet scribed to suggest individual roofing sheets, and has a peel-and-stick backing. I prepainted this material with Testor’s Gray Primer as a good starting point. (At the same time, I painted the Roof Caps, parts #9 and #10, the same gray.) After a coat of flat finish to enable me to use acrylic washes, I added some slight streaking and dirt to the roof. I wanted to do this before the roof sheets are part of the structure.
     The cupola assembly was now glued to the roof. Then the peel-and-stick roof sheets were carefully applied, as were the roof cap strips.I first put them in place gently, so that I could adjust the exact placement if necessary. Then the smokestack was inserted with canopy glue, squared up, and supported from below at the desired height.


     Next came a check of the building in  its intended site. Of course soil and vegetation remain to be added, as does a sidewalk to connect the powerhouse doors to the rest of the complex.


     This building is a considerable improvement over the house with the green roof, as was shown in the first post in this series. This will help complete the scene at the Jupiter Pump & Compressor site, and I will report further when the scene approaches completion.
Tony Thompson

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