I am looking to build 5.5" x 8.5" shed for my layout. It is an ho scale layout that I am looking to build it for. It will have 4.5" tall walls with 3" x 3" doors on the short sides. As far as a roof, I was thinking a peak 12:12 roof. So as a real building this would be a 65' x 40' x 50' shed with doors 20' x 20'. I have made a paper mock-up of the building and decided were it's going to go. I have some old boards from both a barn and a old house that I would like to use, but i don't know how. My questions are how could i rip those boards down to make wood to use? What sort of little table saw or other item do I need? I would likely rip the boards to about 1/2" x whatever strips then cut them to what I need. Another question is if I was to build it out of styrene, how thick do the walls need to be at least to support it's own weight?
I have a Proxxon mini table saw that would be something you could buy if you are planning a number of projects like this. When I bought it a few years ago, it cost a little over $100. Shown on top of my 8" table saw
As far as styrene, Evergreen styrene makes sheets in a number of types - plain, clapboard, board & batten, shiplap and others. They are thick enough to be self supporting; however, a building of the size you are thinking about should have some reinforcing. 1/4"x1/4" styrene on the inside corners, and a piece of sheet 1'' max wide on the inside of any joints in the walls. For the long walls, some horizontal reinforcing would be a good idea as well.
For doors and windows, take a look at Grant Line or Tichy. They make a wide variety of doors and windows that look good and are good quality.
http://www.evergreenscalemodels.com/http://www.grandtline.com/www.tichytraingroup.com
For some reason, the Tichy site is not opening this afternoon.All of the above are carried by Walthershttp://www.walthers.com/exec/manuinfo/293/Tichy_Train_Group.html
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
I was reading about these mandrel things that you put a small saw blade on. it's made by gyros. what if I to make a plate to put on top of that that was positionable? Would that work? I first need to know how it works.
I had to read your post about 7 times until I understood that you wanted to build a model shed.
Here is one I slapped together from spare parts.
I used two boxcars ends from a Tichy boxcar kit......left over doors from same kit......sheet styrene for the floor, scribed for the sides.......left over roof from a Tichy crane boom car kit........and odds and ends for the rack and other junk.
Dennis Blank Jr.
CEO,COO,CFO,CMO,Bossman,Slavedriver,Engineer,Trackforeman,Grunt. Birdsboro & Reading Railroad
CNC:
If you want to use the wood you have available you can rip it into very thin strips but I think you will need something a bit more powerful than a small blade in a mandrel. There will also be a bit of work involved to finish the outsides of the walls to represent board siding. I used a 10" radial arm saw to rip 2 x 4 pine into panels 2" wide by about 1/8" thick for this ice house. I used a ball point pen and a ruler to scribe the joints between the boards:
The weathered effect was achieved by first painting the exterior flat black and then painting over that with flat grey. Before the grey dried I rubbed enough of it off to give the effect you see. If you look carefully you will see some saw marks from the 10" blade but the weathering covered them up enough that they don't stand out.
If you don't have access to a large enough saw then I would use styrene instead. There are lots of textures available so you can do the exterior in board and batton or clapboard or plain vertical boards. You can also make your doors out of styrene stock or buy them already made, along with windows etc. This is a scratch built rural station. The walls are .040" thick which is fairly stable but I would still strongly recommend internal bracing as was mentioned by another poster.
The large freight doors are scratch built from simple styrene stock. The main door panels are "V" groove .040" thick with .100" spacing cut on the diagonal, with .020 x .080 strips glued on the surface to make the rails and stiles. The walls are clapboard with flat strips used to form the corner details etc. The man doors and windows are either Tichy or Grandt Line. The rolled roofing is strips of manilla envelope glued onto .040" flat styrene sheets.
Like most of my stuff, these are works in progress.
I'm glad to hear that you are getting into scratch building. It will be very rewarding!
Don't hesitate to ask more questions.
Dave
I'm just a dude with a bad back having a lot of fun with model trains, and finally building a layout!
hon30critterIf you want to use the wood you have available you can rip it into very thin strips but I think you will need something a bit more powerful than a small blade in a mandrel.
yes i agree, there would be nothing fun about ripping a 2" x 10" board with a 2" blade. I do have access to larger chop and table saws. The only problem is, a 1/8" blade is going to snap, shred and do all sorts of things to a small piece of wood. that is where the idea of the mandrel came in and making some sort of stand to chop wood came in, not to destroy it. The original idea of using wood strips came from the August 2012 issue of model railroader came from the scratch built corn crib using strip styrene. That set off a light bulb of using strip wood for this project and allow me to keep a piece of home on the layout.
hon30critter I used a 10" radial arm saw to rip 2 x 4 pine into panels 2" wide by about 1/8" thick for this ice house. I used a ball point pen and a ruler to scribe the joints between the boards: The weathered effect was achieved by first painting the exterior flat black and then painting over that with flat grey. Before the grey dried I rubbed enough of it off to give the effect you see. If you look carefully you will see some saw marks from the 10" blade but the weathering covered them up enough that they don't stand out.
I used a 10" radial arm saw to rip 2 x 4 pine into panels 2" wide by about 1/8" thick for this ice house. I used a ball point pen and a ruler to scribe the joints between the boards:
Btw: nice job
I like building stuff with wood, but only if it's full-size. Once I discovered styrene for scratchbuilding, I haven't built any structures for the layout from wood.
The main walls of this storage elevator are Evergreen clapboard siding, while the truck/wagon lean-to is built-up from styrene 1"x12" boards on a 3"x6" framework. The roof is .060" thick sheet styrene, covered in Campbell shingles and the stone foundation (also styrene) is from Roundhouse. Windows are from Grandt LIne, and the roof of the lean-to is corrugated aluminum from Campbell:
While the railroad's own structures are a little more well-maintained, many of them are also scratchbuild from styrene:
You can also scratchbuild larger structures, like this farm supply store added-on to a Walthers grain elevator:
...or a coal dealer's elevator:
...a stockyard:
...a packing plant:
...an icehouse:
...or even a simple loading ramp:
Styrene is easy to use, not affected by moisture, quick to assemble and can be made to look like wood, metal, concrete, stone, or just about any building material. It's available in sheets, strips, rod, tubing, and structural shapes, and can be assemble permanently with solvent-type cement or even lacquer thinner.While I've built structures and rolling stock from wood in the past, and have seen many nicely-done wooden models, I doubt that I'll ever use it again for such projects.
Wayne
I should have mentioned that I used a hollow ground planer blade in my radial arm saw. I think Sears still sells them. If you are not familiar with this type of blade it is a little different from most saw blades. It does not have a set to the teeth. Instead the blade is ground so that it gets slightly thinner as you go towards the center. The sides of the teeth are also sharpened so the blade cuts very smoothly. Some veneer blades are made the same way but the planer blade has a much deeper depth of cut.
I should also mention that I am mostly in doctorwayne's camp, although not quite in the same league. I prefer to use styrene.
Wayne,
Those are some very impressive structures you have built. I have kit-bashed a little while using some creative license on craftsman kits, but your work has taken structures to an entirely different level. I can see that I have just scratched the surface of creativity. Thanks for sharing.
Wilton.
I built the shed that serves as the office for my scrapyard from scraps of wood siding by Northeast Scale Lumber. I think the doors and windows were from Tichy. The roof is (probably) styrene sheet covered with masking tape and hand-painted with dark gray craft paint to simulate tarpaper.
For a small scratchbuild, I got a lot of satisfaction from this one. I usually scratch build with styrene, and using the scale wood was a new and thoroughly enjoyable technique.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
If you have access to a woodworking friend, a good bandsaw with a quality blade will slice very thin slices of wood from a 2x. A circular saw is just not made for doing what you're talking about. But like someone has already said, there is a good supply of pre shaped wood already manufactured. For a quick example, take a look at either Kapper Scale Lumber or Northeastern Scale Lumber. You can quickly do a google search for their websites.
I will second what Cedarwoodron said about the risks of using big tools to do small stuff. However, there are risks in lots of things we do. The difference is whether or not you pay attention to the risks and ask yourself "should I be doing this or not?" In my case when I was cutting the thin stock I had all the safety measures in place and I never tried to retrieve anything that fell close to the blade until the saw was stopped completely. Before every cut I drew a visual line along the path of the saw so I could make sure my hand was clear and I wouldn't make a cut if there wasn't a safe amount of room between my hand and the path of the saw. Those bits go in the fireplace. I never made quick repeated cuts. That's when you are going to mess up. I should also mention that I cut the 2 x 4 into 8" lengths and then sliced the slabs off of those instead of using the saw in the rip position.
I am not trying to sound casual about the risks. I sold large woodworking tools for a major portion of my career, and I have seen some pretty nasty videos of how forceful and destructive kickback can be. I had a customer walk into the store one day with his jaw wired shut. He had fed a 2 x 10 into his RAS the wrong way (second day of ownership and too lazy to read either the manual or the warnings posted on the saw right in front of his face).
There will always be risks. It is up to you how you deal with them.
No disrespect intended Cedarwoodron.
Even speaking as a modeller who no longer uses wood for model building, I have to agree with those who have spoken on the safety aspects of making your own stripwood. While I can understand sentimental reasons for wanting to do so (using wood from something which is significant to you personally) as well as the satisfaction which may be gained by "rolling your own", if you want to build with wood, buy it rather than attempting to make it. Not only is it safer, but it is unlikely that anyone can match the quality and consistency afforded by the specialised machinery used by commercial suppliers of strip- and sheet-wood.
The main reason that I stopped using wood was because I was disappointed that the wooden models I had built back in the '50s and '60s didn't seem to physically stand up very well to the passage of time, while my plastic models from that time seemed mostly intact and unchanged. Much of that may have been attributable to both my skills (or lack thereof) and the adhesives of the day, but once styrene scratchbuilding supplies became readily available, I really started to enjoy building things. It was good to know that 20 or 30 years later, they'd still be in one piece, and the only reason to get rid of them might be that I could replace them with an even better version. Another advantage to using styrene over wood is that one of the benefits of wood touted by most who use it, it's uniqueness of grain and the way it takes stain or paint, isn't really something which scales-down very well. I never really realised that until I started working with styrene, and saw what skilled modellers like Harold Minsky could do with styrene, especially when it came to making it look like aged wood. Really, most prototype structures clad with wood use all the same type of wood, with the same general grain. If it's painted, usually it's wood that has little visible grain under paint. If it's something that doesn't necessarily get a coat of paint, like a barn or shed, it's usually all built from the same type of wood - either cheap or weather resistant - and it all weathers more-or-less at the same rate and in the same manner. So while building a model with stripwood will give you that individual board look, too often modellers choose to stain the boards with different colours, negating the advantages of the medium to some degree. That the grain usually doesn't look convincingly to-scale seems to be a drawback, too, at least to me.Nevertheless, my remarks shouldn't be misconstrued as being unappreciative of the fine model-making done by those working with wood: skill and craftsmanship is always recognisable and the satisfaction of creating something, in any material, is an immeasureable reward in itself.
Dave and Wilton, thank you both for your kind words. One of the reasons that I posted so many pictures was to demonstrate both the wealth of of materials and resources available and the ease with which they can be assembled. The coal dealers' elevators, crossing shanties (both types), loading ramps, handcar sheds, lineside sheds, and stock pens, plus others not shown, were built in multiples. Once the parts were cut, they could be assembled as quickly as I wished to work, with no delays, in most cases, waiting for glue to dry and no need to clamp parts together or waste a lot of material for bracing. Yes, bracing is required, especially on larger structures, but using sheet material is simple and cheap, with a 4'x8' sheet of .060" styrene in the $20-$30 range. Using a utility knife and straightedge, you can easily make a lot of bracing from that much material. Using solvent cement means that none of these are going to fall apart as they age, either, and in most cases, no other adhesives are required. If you wish to added wood, paper, or metal parts, contact cement works extremely well, and ca is useful for only very small details.
Another benefit of working with styrene is the ease with which you can kitbash rolling stock and structures, most of which are also made from styrene.My layout is an around-the-room type, so the back side of most structures is never seen. This allows me to build kits using all of the walls on the sides facing the viewer, or even to use those "extra" walls somewhere else.
P&M Languay is an example of this. It's built from parts from two Walthers Waterfront Warehouse kits:
Here it is, removed from its site:
The leftovers were used to build this:
Across the street from Languay's is the railroad's main station and headquarters, with an express building and post office part of the structure, too:
It was built almost entirely from .060" sheet styrene, utilising doors and modified windows left-over from the same Walthers kits - these kits came with two complete sets of windows, a real bargain for kitbashers :
So, by all means build with wood, but I think that you'll have better (and safer) results using what's commercially available. And when you've completed that project, give styrene a try, too.