Looking forward to all that you have to share with us!

A few buildings on the edge of nowhere...in HO Scale.

There have been a few members here who have built Fine Scale Miniatures Sewall's Foundry. One thread in particular was from my friend, Nelson458 (Tony Burgess), and you can find that here: https://railroad-line.com/node/35597

I have always liked that building and I am going to scratchbuild / kitbash it. I did find a kit on Ebay a couple of years ago, but before I let it go, I had made some molds of the metal walls of the main building. My purpose for doing that is I hate to paint on metal and would rather paint or stain hydrocal walls. For me, I have better ability to control the coloring of this medium over metal. For me at least, by using floquil paints and floquil stains in thin washes, letting the layers dry in between washes, color is more subtle and softer in appearance than trying to achieve the same look using primer on metal with additional coats of paint. If your paint is too thick, it absures many of the fine details. Craft paints or other paints like Model Color AV Vallejo can be used as well, but for my application I went with Floquil.

Before proceeding any further in this thread discussion, I must note that my computer crashed and I lost a considerable amount of modeling information, including pictures, etc. I normally take quite a lot of pictures when constructing my models, so you may not see some of the steps I took in between some of the pictures I will present here. I will note that as I go along best I can.

First picture is the FSM Kit cover



As I previously noted "above" having made molds of the main building walls, I stored them in a plastic container to be used at a later time. Upon opening the container a few years later, some of the molds had stuck together and melted at thier corners. I think there had been a reaction between the metal and the brushable liquid rubber after the molds were made. I did have the partial molds that were still useable and I poured them anyway. After drying for a few days, I saw that some of the wall corners need filling to complete a finished wall. So, I mixed up a small container of Castin Craft powdered hydrocal and water, and using a small paint brush, I filled in the missing stones at the corners of the walls.

Ok..now a sketch I made using my molds as a guide..



That's where I will leave this for today.. Comments are welcome and thanks for looking.

Rich