Large Scale Shingles and Siding
Large Scale Shingles and Siding
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How to make great looking shingles and siding quickly, easily and very inexpensively from flat sheets of styrene. Introduction - why use styrene Shingles and siding made out of wood look great in Large Scale Model Construction - as long as you keep them indoors. Outdoors, there is no easy way to permanently protect them from the ravages of time and weather. Unfortunately, the deterioration of wood does not scale down - what is only a cosmetic problem penetrating mere fractions of an inch into the surface of the wood of prototype buildings is disastrous when it attacks a model building where the wood is so thin to start with. To construct outdoor buildings that maintain a well-kept look year after year, something other than wood is in order. Styrene plastic to the rescue. Properly painted, styrene buildings or styrene clad buildings are weatherproof, rot proof, and not subject to cracking, curling or warping. Using the proper techniques, painted shingles and siding made of styrene are indistinguishable from newly painted shingles and sidings made of real wood. The techniques required to work with the styrene are a little different, but no more difficult than those used with wood.
Types of Siding and Types of Shingles What is siding? Siding is material applied to the outside walls of a building to keep out the weather. Siding must protect both the building and itself from the effects of the elements including sun, wind, rain, snow, hail, blowing sand, blazing heat, intense cold, you name it. For convenience, the materials that make up a wall are included if they are not normally covered with additional material, for example the logs of a log cabin. There are many types of siding, and most of them can be replicated with sheet styrene with the expectation that they will look good and at the same time will do what siding is supposed to do - resist the elements. Some sidings that cannot be replicated in sheet styrene, or can be modelled in better ways include adobe or stucco (use real stucco), stone (use real rocks), natural aluminum or stainless steel (use nickel silver), corrugated iron (use crimped pop cans) and logs (use real wood). Other sidings, including drop siding, shiplap, boards, board & batten, painted metal, concrete, ceramic tile, and vinyl can be easily made of styrene. What are shingles? Shingles are one class of material applied to sloped roofs of a buildings to resist the elements. Shingles must work harder than siding, both in model buildings and in full size ones, because they are more exposed to the sun which tends to break them down, and they are less vertical, making it harder for them to shed water. Cedar shakes and asphalt shingles, both very common in North America, are easily replicated in styrene. These styrene shingles have outstanding performance. Other types of roof coverings, such as straw (thatch) and concrete or clay tiles, do not lend themselves to replication in sheet styrene.
The very cheapest of construction was done using plain boards applied vertically. It was used mostly in buildings that were not expected to last for many years. It was not a particularly weather proof construction method, as anyone who has used a prairie privy in a blizzard will attest. A step up is construction using shiplap. Shiplap has rebates cut along the edges so that there are no gaps between boards when the edges are overlapped. Usually, shiplap was applied diagonally as a sheathing on framed walls and roofs, then covered with tar paper and siding or shingles. Shiplap would be seen exposed in buildings under construction, or more rarely, as siding on finished buildings. Shiplap had fallen out of favour by the 1960's, being replaced by plywood sheets. Shiplap is included here with vertical boards because modelling them in styrene is similar. Plain boards can be easily simulated by scribing parallel grooves in styrene. Typical board widths would be 6" to 12" or so, or about 3/8" to 3/4" in 1:16 scale, 1/4" to 1/2" inch in 1:24 scale or 3/16" to 3/8" in 1:32 scale. For all round use, about 3/8" is a good compromise, but of course you can alter this for your scale if you want. The author achieves wider scribe marks than can be made with a utility knife by using a tools made out of an old file. In practice, to make boards, you cut a sheet of .060" styrene the size of your wall. Then you mark every 3/8" across the top and across the bottom. Finally, you use a steel straight edge to connect the marks and guide the scribing tool. Tip - if you align the edge of the sheet closest to you with the near edge of your table, then when your scribing tool reaches the end of the sheet of styrene it will just drop into space rather than gouging your table. Do not be overly concerned if the scribing tool occasionally deviates from the line, after all, even the best of boards occasionally crack. If you want rough-sawn boards, sand the front of the styrene with 50 grit sandpaper after scribing the lines. Generally for plain boards it is easiest to first scribe and optionally sand the styrene, then install windows and doors. You can also make shiplap sheathing by scribing the styrene at a 45 degree angle. However, as the width of shiplap rarely exceeds 6", you should close up your spacing accordingly. Shiplap was occasionally applied horizontally as a combination of sheathing and siding, for example, in the construction of grain bins. In that case, just scribe the lines horizontally at the narrower width. Shiplap was always supplied planed on both sides, so the surface should be left smooth unless you want to simulate weather damage. Like with boards, it is easiest to install windows and doors after finishing the shiplap.
Covering the spaces between boards with battens (narrow strips of wood) gave a much better siding that boards alone. Boards expand and shrink, and the worst shrinkage is across the width of the board. New boards, nailed to new beams top and bottom, would always shrink more than the beams, leaving gaps between the boards. Covering the gaps with battens, which were nailed to only one of the boards to allow for expansion and contraction, kept most of the weather from finding its way through the gaps. But only most. The author remembers a winter spent in the board & batten annex to a boarding house. The inside of the boards had been sealed by wall papering the room. But of course the boards shrank in the winter, cracking the wall paper between every board. The lines of snow that would drift across the beds during the night attested to the fact that it was only most of the weather that was being kept out. In defence of the boarding house owner, it must be said that she was a heck of a good cook. Board and batten siding is probably the easiest siding to replicate in sheet styrene. You cut strips of .030" styrene about 1/8" wide from a sheet that you have marked on the back with pencil lines. You will have to score deeply, or even cut right through with the knife as narrow strips are hard to snap off. (You might even consider buying precut strips for this job.) Then take the building wall that you have cut out of .060" styrene and mark where the battens should go, about 3/8" apart. If the spacing does not work out evenly, make one or two boards narrower. It did not work out perfectly on the full size buildings either, and they would have to rip saw a board or two. Generally it is easier to mark for the battens first, then install the windows and doors and put the battens on last. Apply the battens, pencil marked side down, with solvent cement applied with a brush. Applying pencil side down will eliminate having to remove the burrs left from cutting.
Drop siding was and still is used extensively in the construction of homes and other small buildings that are expected to protect their occupants from the weather for many decades. It is a more costly form of construction as it is applied over a framed and sheathed wall, but is arguably the most weather resistant of the wood sidings. The elegance of drop siding can be beautifully replicated in sheet styrene.
Making drop siding out of styrene is easy. First you decide on the width of your siding, that is, the width exposed to the weather plus the width of the overlap. Then you cut strips that width out of .030" flat styrene sheet. That is all there is to it. But there are a few hints that will make it easier. Somewhere to start is 1/4" to the weather and 1/8" overlap - it looks good in all the large scales and cutting strips 3/8" wide is easy. Take a sheet of .030" styrene about 60% to 70% larger than the outside surface of your building. Score it every 3/8" in parallel lines but do not snap it just yet. If you want rough siding, sand the side of the sheet opposite the score marks sheet with 50 grit sandpaper, working parallel to the score marks. If you want smooth siding, then run a pencil back and forth on the side opposite the score marks. Then snap the pieces apart. Lastly, remove the burrs from the edges on the side that you scored (the side opposite your sanding or pencil marks) by scraping with a sharp knife - one or two passes should do it. Deburring will ensure adequate contact for solvent welding, as illustrated in the page on Working with Styrene. Applying drop siding is easy too if you have drawn parallel lines across the walls of your building to indicate where the tops of the strips are to be placed. See the illustration at left, which is larger than full size on your screen. In the illustration, the parallel lines are marked every odd 1/8" down from the top of the wall, that is, at 1/8", 3/8", 5/8" etc. Applying this siding is even easier is you have used these lines as guides for cutting the tops and bottoms of window and door openings, and have framed the windows and doors on both sides and across the tops with 1/8" wide strips of .060 styrene. This also is shown in the illustration at left. The first strip to be applied is not really a strip of siding at all, but a starter strip to angle the bottom piece of siding outwards at the bottom and to reinforce the bottom of the wall. In the finished model, this strip will represent the concrete foundation wall on which the building sits (in the real world, siding stops at least 6" above the ground). We can call it the concrete strip. The concrete strip in the illustration is 5/8" wide (4' - 3-3/8"). It should be cut from the same thickness of styrene as the siding. Apply concrete strips to all the walls by lining them up with the lowest of the parallel lines and applying solvent cement with a brush. For more details, see Working with Styrene. Now you are ready for the main event. Working from the bottom up, apply strips of siding one at a time. Where siding strips lay flat against one another, solvent weld with a liquid cement. Where the siding strips intersect at an angle, use tube glue for a little bit of filling. For example, the first strips of siding intersect both the walls and the top of the cement strips at an angle so tube glue should be applied to the top of the cement strip and to the inside top of the siding strip before it is applied. Then the second strips can be applied, using tube glue along the top edges where they intersect the walls at an angle, but using solvent cement applied along the bottom edges of the strips where the second strips lies flat over the first strips (see illustration). On any sides with doors, butt the strips tight up to the door frames - the corners of the building are not quite so fussy if they will be covered later on with battens. For modern buildings with mitred corners, see below. Work upward, strip by strip until the bottom of the window sill is reached. Above this, proceed as for doors, with the additional complication that pieces between windows should butt up tight to both windows - some careful cutting is required here but siding is cheap and we can afford to throw away any mistakes. Above the windows, the bottom of the next strip must be spaced out again. Use some scraps of styrene cut 1/8" wide and the same lengths as the windows. These pieces too can be seen just above the window frame in the illustration. Add pieces of siding up to the last marked line, just below the top of the wall. The last strips are narrower, only the width that is exposed to the weather (1/4" typically) and should only be applied after the roof is installed. When they are installed, they should be well glued to both the wall and the underside of the roof at the top edge, as well as solvent welded at the bottom. This will help keep the roof firmly in place. On gable walls (walls that are pointed at the top to accommodate the slopes of the roof), continue adding siding right up to the tip. Do not be too concerned with trimming the ends - just be sure the pieces are long enough to overhang at both ends. Once the glue has had a chance to dry, turn the wall face down and trim the siding strips with a sharp knife, using the wall as a guide. For a simple building, this can be done even after the four walls are joined together. This method is much faster than attempting to fit a lot of pieces between two overhanging pieces of roof. After all the siding has been added, corner battens can be added. The corner battens are 1/4" wide deburred strips of .030 styrene glued to the corners with tube glue. Align the corners carefully for a neat finish, even going so far as to file or scrape them to an exact fit once the glue has dried. Corner battens set the age of the building as pre World War II. For a post World War II building using drop siding with mitred corners, careful matching of the corners of the siding strips is required. One way to do this is as follows. For each layer of siding, add one strip to each short walls , leaving about 1/2" of overhang at each end. Then trim off the overhang using a sharp knife, scoring on the inside and snapping outward. Then add one strip to each long wall, again leaving about 1/2" of overhang. Again trim, using the same method. Once all the siding is in place, use a bit of filler (Squadron Green Putty for example) to fill any voids in the joints on the end walls. Finally, once the putty has dried (a good 24 hours) file the putty and the ends of the long wall strips to achieve perfect joints. For a background building, you might skip the filling and sanding steps, but if you care to do them, you too can achieve museum quality in your building project.
Concrete, Painted Metal and Ceramic Tiles as Siding If you are modelling the modern period in Large Scale, you may well want to include a modern building or two. No space for a 30 story building that stands 10' high in scale? Perhaps a more reasonable 8 or 10 stories 3' or 4' high, with only the front modelled would be more reasonable, and would be equally effective as a backdrop. The author cannot claim a lot of Large Scale experience in this area, but has built full scale (i.e. not compressed) 10 to 12 story buildings in HO-scale. One might assume that these buildings, towering 18" high, would over power the trains. But the opposite seems to occur - seeing the trains in the same context that we see full sized trains seems to give them that much more presence. Large Scale trains already have a lot of presence, but how much more would they have if they too were put into context. They certainly look good against the authors 100 scale foot high grain elevator. Making styrene look like concrete or painted metal is largely a matter of painting - a flat, very light grey for concrete, a semi-gloss to full gloss in any colour for painted metal and ceramic tile. Shaping the styrene to look like concrete, metal or tile depends on what you are trying to achieve so only a few generalities will be offered. The simplest concrete buildings show large expanses of flat concrete interrupted only by an expansion joint every 20' to 30'. Easy to model - just scribe a joint every 20' to 30' - but not too interesting. Concrete buildings with raised panels or fancy jointing can often be replicated by adding strips or panels of various thicknesses of styrene to a base piece of styrene which serves as the wall. The strips and panels can be affixed using solvent welding, but remember to deburr the edges first. For inspiration, have a look at some modern cast concrete buildings. They are usually a basic unit repeated over and over. With a bit of imagination, you will be able to see how the basic units can be made by piling up layers of styrene. Metal may be used in utility buildings put together from jointed flat or formed panels, or it may form part of the wall on curtain wall buildings. An example of flat panel metal buildings are those electrical cabinets the railroads put up at every set of lights. To make a flat panel building, ribs made of strips of styrene can be added to a plain styrene building to simulate joints, much like battens are added to board and batten buildings. Sometimes formed panels for formed panel buildings can be simulated by adding wider strips to a plain styrene building. Metal panels on skyscrapers were sometimes used below or above windows. The panels and windows might alternate in vertical rows, separated by strips of exposed concrete or metal, with many vertical rows placed side by side and separated by similar strips. Modelling a building of this type might entail gluing pieces of prepainted styrene to represent painted metal panels, and strips of nickel silver or code 100 nickel silver rail or strips of styrene painted as concrete to the front of a sheet of Lexan or other brand of polycarbonate.
Other Siding Undoubtedly there are other kinds of siding that can be modelled with flat styrene. Once the modeller becomes familiar with the techniques of working with styrene, other techniques will come to mind. And while this article is based on using flat industrial styrene sheet, there is no reason (other than perhaps price) to exclude the use of sheet styrene with factory moulded finishes, or overlays of embossed plastic sheets. And even if every attempt does not turn out perfect, what goes wrong will often suggest how to make it go right the next time.
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