All stones left unturned.

In ending last weeks post, I mused that perhaps we would see stone cladding on the buildings by the end of the week.
It didn’t happen.
Why is that? It’s my own fault. I put embossed brick styrene on the top of the chimney. As soon as I’d done that my fate was sealed. Take a look at the picture below. Embossed styrene on the top and stone paper below. The difference is staggering.

The difference 

Even though the brick is unpainted, and the stone paper quite outstanding in its realism, it is, as I observed in a previous post, flat. I thought I was going to be OK with that but now it bothers me, and other developments coming up will make the lack of relief even more noticeable. So I headed to the internet to find some embossed plasticard.
I found a nice Plastruct stone wall texture. I hope that will work.
So what did I spent the rest of the week doing?
One evening I recorded a revived Micro Model Railroad Cartel podcast. “Cartel Conversations” with Tom Conboy. It looks like there could be more of them on the way. So look out for Cuddle talk there.
The rest of the week has been spent working on the covered loading dock.
A lot of effort was expended on building a strip wood frame, staining it, and now working on the corrugated iron cladding for it.
Here, in good old step-by-step fashion is the work I’ve done so far.

Step 1. The frame is assembled from stripwood. If it were a real building, it would probably be blown away in a gust of wind. However, it’s only there to provide support to the cladding so it will be fine as you will only get an obstructed view of it.

Step 2. The shell gets stained with my India Ink weathering wash. It looks a bit dark in this image, almost like the wood is burnt and charred. But it dried lighter.

Step 3. Experimenting with what cladding to use on the frame. This is embossed styrene, as I had it to hand. Though in the end, I opted for downloaded textures run through my scale crimper.

Step 4. The platform of the loading dock. Once again, stripwood stained with the India Ink wash. An excellent effect. The wash is made by adding a few drops of Indian Ink to a pint of rubbing alcohol. I wash it over many things to tone them down. That pint has lasted me years.

Step 5. Rusting corrugated iron textures, downloaded from textures.com. Cut to size, distressed, and run through my Fiskars corrugated crimper. A much better effect than I could ever hope for with painted embossed styrene.

What else have I been up to this week? Well there was another mockup made, as I thought about adding a working sliding door to the store room. As you can see from the video “keep it simple” is the watchword.

In closing this weeks report, I’m not going to make any rash promises about putting stone cladding on any of the structures. I’ve learned my lesson there.