Warehouse Update
There’s progress on the warehouse for the P48 display. Well sort of. I thought I would have to start over again because of errors I felt were accumulating as the build went on but, after a thorough look this morning, I decided I could live with those minor discrepancies, which is the good news. However, I am going to redo the first floor in order to keep the brick courses consistent across the loading door openings. It’s a bit wasteful of material this way but not too bad since I’ll be able to use the scrap pieces elsewhere.
One thing that held up construction was choosing what type of glue to use in bonding the plastic brick sheets to the wood and hardboard substructure. Gel CA is the obvious choice but with nearly eight square feet of building facade to cover, the cost would be ridiculous. I considered contact cement but had reservations about what it would do to the plastic. I tried a number of different adhesives with mixed success. All of them bonded with the substructure but not the plastic brick sheets. The search continued and I finally settled on a glue from Lowe’s Home Improvement Center that I have never seen before.
Go2 Glue from Loctite is a clear, thick bodied adhesive, similar to gel CA but with a much longer open time for positioning things. It sets in 30 minutes and seems to hold everything in place nicely when dry. It isn’t a permanent bond however, at least not with the plastic brick sheets as my experiment revealed. That said, the bond is strong enough that I’m not concerned about things falling apart.
As you can see here, I painted the window openings on the substructure black using a spray can. This is to disguise the lack of depth behind the window frames and also any raw edges that are too small to cover with brick sheet. After that it’s simply a matter of counting out the appropriate number of brick courses and cutting the sheets as needed. I admit I was surprised at how quickly this went. I thought I would be gluing pieces of brick sheet forever.
I do have to make some adjustments before things get too far along such as trimming the bottom edge so the warehouse floor will match the height of the box car floors. A quick pass through the table saw should fix that. (He says with supreme confidence in the outcome.)
Once the flat has served its purpose on the display, I will trick it out with a deeper side wall and roof for placement on the layout. For now, I just want to get this section done because the Collinsville, IL RPM meet in August will be here in a heartbeat.
Regards,
Mike
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