The Lizard Head Scene
I tend to jump around when it comes to working on the layout. This morning I went out to the layout and started working on the scenery around Lizard Head. After all, I had the tunnel portal, bunk house and section house ready to go so why not? Here's an overall picture of the Lizard Head scene.
Hillside, Cut & Tunnel Portal
With all of the foam in place, this is the viewing angle for a person who is around 6' tall. Here at the summit, the railroad is about 60" off the floor.
Snow Fences
There were snow fences on both sides of the tracks south of the Lizard Head snow sheds. While I'm not sure about including the snow sheds, the snow fences should make an interesting addition and won't interfere with operations. A simple assembly fixture was made from styrene and the wood was stained with SilverWood. The posts are 6x6's and the fencing is 2x8's.
The prototype fencing appears from pictures to be about 9 or 10 feet tall. I made a quick mock-up using a piece of scrap styrene and decided 9 feet looked out of scale in my scene; 6 or 7 feet looked better. I settled on 6 1/2'. With the exception of the bottom fence board, the remaining fence boards were cut to random lengths.
The fence boards were placed in the fixture and the post were glued in place six feet apart using Aleene's tacky glue.
Here is about 110 scale feet of finished fence.
The Stock Pens
About 3 years ago I bought a Banta Modelworks stock pens kits (BMW-138S) from a dealer. I used the kit, plus additional parts purchased directly from Banta to build my Old Placerville stock pens. While Banta no longer stocks some of the older S-Scale kits, like the stock pens, they will make up the older kits upon request. I ordered my 2 additional kits/parts in one box without instructions.
My Old Placerville stock pens were mounted on a separate piece of 1" pink foam. A lot of time went into building these pens so I wanted them to be easily removed.
The kit doesn't really include traditional step-by-step instructions There are 16 pages of drawings, with minimal instructions along with a CD containing a series of helpful photographs. While the double deck chute assembly is a bit complicated the rest of the kit is pretty straight forward. I did have a couple of issues when building the kits. I have underlined those issues in the description below.
The Gates
The laser cut fencing was left on the sprue and sanded on both sides. One side requires a little more work due to burn marks from the laser cutter. Most of the discoloration should be sanded away. The fencing and strip wood (posts) were then stained with Builders In Scale Silverwood... Surprise surprise. The fencing was left on the sprue while the posts and diagonals were glue on with Aleen's tacky glue; no surprise here either. The nice thing about tacky glue is that if any squeezes out between the parts it can easily be removed with a tooth pick without leaving any visible residue.
Here are the all the gate assemblies. Note that the 2 in the lower left hand corner are still on their sprues. The next 2 gates, to the right, are the extension gates. They are designed to be operational so a bit of extra care needs to be taken with the glue. It should also be noted that the long laser cut diagonals on the larger gates had to be shortened about a 1/4" on the upper end.
The Chute Assembly
This chutes are the most difficult part of the kit to assemble. Here is a picture of the Old Placerville double deck chute assembly. Sheep were typically loaded in double deck stock cars so both a lower and upper chute were required.
The instructions call for assembling the chutes over the plan. This is somewhat problematic in that the plans don't line up with the laser cut pieces. The plan included with my kit is larger, around 4-6 scale inches over the length of the chutes. When I built the Placerville pens, I lined the parts up with one end of the plan and went on from there. This caused a few alignment problems in subsequent steps. This time, I aligned a center post with the plan and worked out from there. We'll see how that works out. The laser cut fencing was taped to the plan and the post were glued in place using a straight edge along the bottom.
When it came to assembling the chutes, everything lined up this time around. My kit included a neat little pine block that along with a set of squaring fixture made what would have been a challenging assembly easy.
The Chute Floors
The instructions suggest using ACC to attach the cleats to the chute floors. I'm hesitant to use ACC on wood. It is difficult to control and can leave a shiny spot, when exposed, on the wood that is almost impossible to get rid of. Instead I diluted some tacky cement with water, spread it out on a sheet of styrene, dropped the laser cut cleats into the glue mix and then transferred the cleats onto the floor. All the part were sealed with a coat of Tamiya.
Here are the finished chutes. Assembly took about 3 hours.
The view from the opposite side.
That's enough for one night!
Final Assembly
The fencing requires a lot of posts. The strip wood was pre-stained and a NWSL Chopper was used to cut all the post cut all the posts at tne time. The posts were glued to the fencing with tacky glue using a straight edge along the bottom to keep the fence posts level. There are small board tabs separating the boards on the laser cut fencing. They also show the location of the fence posts. They need to be cut away once the posts are glued to the fencing.
The stock pens are mounted on a piece of hard board. The hard board was cut to fit the available space on the layout and the pens were assembled on my work desk. They pens were then built to fit the hard board. Work on the back side of the pens first. Assembly was a measure, cut, test fit and glue in place process. Squares were used to keep the fencing straight.
Once the back side was done, the base was turned around to work on the front side.
It was another late night, around 2:15 AM, so the pens got finished in the morning.
As always, your comments, suggestions and questions are welcome
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