Side Project: BV's 40s Gas Station

 Very nice project

Mike

Thanks! I appreciate it.

Looks a lot better than those plastic jobs.

It will look terrific on the layout.

Now what is the next project?

Next project has to be getting trains running on the layout. I have to erect all of the OSB sub-roadbed with lots of joists and risers (L-girder all the way), buy a ton of additional Ross track, Ross and flexibed roadbed and Brennan Ballast. I'm going to wire for DCS/Legacy although I haven't bought either control system yet. That may wait until next year.

I have a wonderful resin firehouse kit from Westport Models, and the Parkside Diner from Miller Engineering to build. I also have the Bar Mills Gravely Building to build. So there's plenty of fun kits to build.

I have a Victorian RR station that I scaled up from an HO plan in the Kalmbach Structures book that's 3/4 done. It was a bear of a project since it's an English Tudor style and each cross mullion had to be individually sized and cut. It's entirely styrene. I'm going to finish it!

Notice how the "Novelty Board" siding changes direction from horizontal to vertical two times going up the building. I used the "scribe/snap" method to make the walls so the window openings were nice and square. It's a neat method to use when working with styrene since liquid cement fuses the walls back together as a solid.

Fitting the roofs were very challenging. These are cardboard templates waiting for the final aircraft ply versions.

The structure is all Grandt Line windows and doors. I found that there is a mold defect in the mullions of one of the window sizes so they kept breaking without applying any pressure.

There is still the roofs to finish, flooring and interior detail, glazing all those windows and painting. Masking will take hours. The passenger overhanging roofs will be Evergreen "raised seam metal roofing". I used this on my Idaho Hotel and it looks great. 

I'd say I have a month of work left in it.

Here's the roof on the Idaho

In case you haven't seen this type of roof, it's a sheet of plastic with fine grooves molded in, and then strips of fine styrene that's glued in to make the ribs. Lots of work, but looks great.

Here's today's work on the Gas Station:

Still going ahead on finishing this engaging and at times, tedious little project. I installed all the windows after preparing the side windows. I made the inner-panel of the rear-most window in an open position. This required installing a brass rod to act as a hinge pin and provide something to glue the inner piece to. I then sprayed the garage door and the side windows with flat spray since these windows in a gas station are not usually clean and are more to let light in than to view the interior from the outside. I left the office windows and door clean since these would be more "public" facing.

As you can also see in the first pic, I've been busy putting on the decals. And of course, I ran out of the green stripping decals from Microscale. I was sure there would be enough, but there wasn't. I not sure what I'm going to do at this point. I could mask and paint, but my color match isn't so hot. I'll see how I feel.

Here's the front of the station showing the decals in the office windows.

Then I spent some time building the main street sign. It was a challenging little affair involving drilling a 0.032" hole 6.5" from the bottom, inserting and then gluing a brass cross-bar, and finally gluing those little fillagreed brackets into the joints. There's also a little round pewter ball glued into the top of the staff. The sign is a piece of styrene that came with the kit, shaped by a template that was part of the instructions. I cut some saw kerfs into the sheet to mount the stems of some eyebolts. These came from my ship building supplies since the ones included in the kit were way too large. I sanded the CA flat and then used some decal setting solution to snuggle the decals down over the grooves left by the gluing operation.

Next up, complete the foam core base and start mounting everything all together. Should be done in a couple more sessions and then it's back to the railroad. I'm fix'n to order all the track in the next couple of days along with the foam roadbed. I'm also ordering a couple of truss bridge kits that I found in Plastruct's catalog. They're the least expensive way to go for a scale-looking bridge, but I'll have to build them. Oh well... more blogging.

Great modeling!  Thanks for sharing your work!  I appreciate your sharing the details of the project.  Bo   

You can visit my website Bo's Trains at http://www.bostrains. 

Thanks! I corrected the green I mixed to make it a little closer to the Sinclair color. I used Tamiya skinny tape to mask the stripes. While removing the masking tape for the stripe fix, I pulled off part of the "Sinclair" decal right smack in the middle of the front. My older grandson admonished me not to try and repaint it, but offered that I used the big "Tires, Tires, Tires" decal that came with the set. I took his advice and put the banner over the half-missing Sinclair sign.

Today I made a big step... I prepared the base and glued the building to it. I scribed around the inside and outside of the walls and then scraped the paint off the resin base between the scribed lines. I found that when I glued the shelf to the back wall that the glue would stick to the paint, but the paint wasn't sticking so well to the resin substrate and the whole thing was very easy to knock off, so I didn't want to take any chances with this major assembly.

I used the Formula 560 adhesive to do this. It's supposedly good for joining dissimilar materials, dries somewhat flexible, so it seemed like a possibility. Gorilla Glue, while very strong, foams when it cures and seeps out of the joint area. Epoxy seemed like overkill. CA is too unforgiving, brittle and doesn't facilitate moving things once they're in place. I clamped and weighted the two parts. When I unclamped after an hour, the joint was not yet set. I'm now letting it sit overnight. The label says "3 hour set time and 24 hour full cure". I also glued the soda machine on the sidewalk which served as my test to see if the glue was holding.

I you look closely you can see that I scraped off the paint at the door sill to the Ladies room. I'll touch that up later. You can also see the "Coke" bottle sitting on top of the Coke machine. The kit came with two bottles along with a half-filled case of Coke. I painted the bare pewter with Tamiya clear green which produces a very believable green glass bottle. The other bottle is glued to the workbench.

I also glued the stuff for the gas island; pumps, trash can and oil can locker.

Next I turned my attention to the office shelf unit, gluing all the little bits and pieces in there. I'm going to paint them once the glue sets firmly. I also used the F-560 cement for these parts.

The kit instructions suggest using some of the decals to label these things. They're going in the office and won't be seen again. I'm not going to do that.

Next session I'll touch up the base, and start preparing another base that all this stuff goes on. I've been using foam core as bases for the building. It will need to be painted asphalt color and have a sidewalk built. Since foam core is a paper covered, I can't use water-based paints directly on it. I'm going to prepare the surface first with an oil-based primer. I'll probably go with the Krylon I used for the building. I may install a concrete pad with the tank filler plates, but I'm not sure if this it the way gas stations did it in the 50s.

Really nice modeling:  Gas stations are popular on layouts..quite a few kits in HO..

to upscale plans from.... and I have scratchbuilt/kitbashed several (probably too many to use on layout), using BV details.  That Victorian station is really impressive...all will want to see that finished.

Me too!

Just one picture today... I'm now building the baseboard to hold the entire diorama. I also glued in all the detail pieces including the tire air regulator using Walthers' Goo. The garage looks very busy.

I'm keeping about 10 scale feet on each side, 15 scale feet in the rear and enough space for 2 cars, the gas island and a 4-foot sidewalk with a 9" curb. I cut a piece of thin styrene sheet that will be the sidewalk. I'll scribe the expansion joints in it and then paint it concrete gray. I also have to figure a way to make believable curb cuts where the driveways will go leading into the gas station. It's on 3/8" foam core so making the slopes is not a straight forward activity. It my be best to cut out the foam core entirely and carve a piece of balsa or use some other moldable material to shape the entries. I have a couple of options here including Sculpy and Sculpt-a-mold. The latter works like modeling clay and then you bake it in an oven for 15 minutes which makes it almost as hard as ceramic. As I'm writing this (and thinking out loud), Sculpt-a-Mold might be the best way to go. It could also be carved plaster of paris.

The baseboard was painted with Krylon Gray primer to make it water-proof and then airbrushed the base with Model Tech "Grimy Black" water-based paint. Model Tech is great stuff, but very hard to find. I airbrushes with no odor at all and dries quickly. I'm going to use some weathering powders next session to age the asphalt a bit. I'm also going to glue some styrene circles to simulate the gas tank filler locations (Regular and Hi-test). There was no "un-leaded" in 1955.

I took this picture using the focus stacking software to give a very deep depth of field, but since I took it without flash, the brightness from one exposure to the other varied a lot. The software got the focus correct, but it messed up the lighting so some of the pieces ended up looking awful. I then went back and picked parts of each individual exposure and cut them out and pasted them to the composite. This worked pretty well—took a lot of time too—and gives a close approximation of the station as it is at this stage.

I also selectively brightened up the interior by masking it (digitally) and lightening that area. Here's a before and after look without editing and with it. You can particularly see the distortion in the gas pumps, the lamppost, the left shadow side of the building, and the halos around some objects. It seems to have picked parts with the least exposure and parts with the most and then stuck them together. These are all artifacts of the focus stacking software.

Before

After

The white strip in the front is the beginnings of the sidewalk. You can also just see the edge of the foam core. The curb will cover this edge.

And one more thing: the chimneys are almost done. Today I added some "tar" flashing around their bases (and the waste stack) using a mixture of Aleen's Tacky glue (a high viscosity white glue) and Tamiya flat black acrylic paint. They blend together nicely and formed a thick, black caulking that looks very real. Next I'm going to paint the stacks a "galvanized steel" looking mixture of gray and silver, then using some rust powders to age them.

Today I bit the bullet and ordered a boatload of Ross track and Flexibed roadbed which arrives some time next week. This should have the effect of getting me back to the railroad post haste.

Today I continued work on the gas station base trying to build a decent set of curb cuts to allow cars to enter and leave the premises.

I decided on the Sculpey method. Sculpey is a modelling clay like material that hardens to ceramic-like hardness after you back it at 275ºF for 15 minutes. Some of you may recall my use of this product to carve the flight crew for the B-17. I made a mold box based on dimensions that I estimated would work for the height of the curb (9 scale inches) and the thickness of the foam core. This mold box picture doesn't show the front dam that I added to set the front edge thickness.

 After stuffing the Sculpey into the box I attempted to shape it to resemble a concrete curb cut that one finds leading into everything that enters off of a paved road with a sidewalk. This station's going to sit in an urban environment with streets, curbs, and sidewalks.

Here's what the raw sculpted pieces looked like

After firing, I didn't like how lumpy it was, so I used some trusty DAP filler—the kind that goes on pink and turns white when it dries—to level the curb cuts. I traced the pieces and cut the foam core to accept them. After using CA to hold them firm, I noted that they didn't match the heights after all—so much for the mold box idea—and I put another layer of DAP to give a nice slope right up to the pavement. Next session, I'll sand it smooth and get ready to paint. I also added the sidewalk (a scale 4' wide) and engraved expansion joints every 4 scale feet. I'll use the same "aged concrete" color as I did for the gas station base. I'm spraying the dried curb cuts with Dulcoat lacquer before painting. The paint I'm using is water-based and it could soften the filler without this barrier. Also, you'll note there's no paint where the station and the gas island sit. I masked this off so I'll be gluing to native foam core surface rather than paint, just to be more secure.

Here are the cuts installed with the added filler and the pavement in place. Once painted it should look pretty believable. What's not believable is the 90º sharp turn that cars will have to make after leaving the gas island in order to leave the station. The base should have been 6" wider to give a realistic curve. But I didn't want it to take up that much real estate so foreshortening is allowed.

I'm going to glue some curbing on the front edge to hide the foam core's interior and finish it off. When I mount the piece into the layout, the street surface will come up higher on the edge and hopefully will set the the 9 scale inch actual curb height.

While all this was drying, I installed the florescent light and it's starter into the station. Both the lamppost and the florescent light require 12 volts. The florescent needs DC, the incandescent light can use either AC or DC. So I'm going to buy a cheap HO power pack to provide the DC. I could also use a AC Adapter that generates 12 volts with enough amps to drive this building AND the Parkway Diner. This is another project waiting in the wings that is a completely photoetched product of a nice modern stainless steel diner with a full interior and both florescent lights and a Electro Luminescent panel that lights up and says "Diner". I'm not starting that kit until the trains are running, but it will also need 12 volt DC. 

The gas station is complete and it's now time to get back to building the railroad upon which it will lie. My grandson (the young one) painted two coats of Model Tech "concrete grey" with a brush, but we needed it to be uniform so he convinced me to airbrush it. After airbrushing I sprayed a coat of Tamiya Flat Clear and then added some weathering powders to age it a bit. The curb cuts look convincing now that they're painted. I'm done this thread, but I'm going to adding to the layout thread.

Terrific work.  Definetly a treat to see.  Thanks for posting the photos.

Outstanding!  Thank you so much....the pics have given me lots of good ideas!

Peter

Thanks to all. Now return to my Layouts thread for more excitement there.

Beautiful work!!!

Alan

Just beautiful, awesome work

Alex

Really superb work!  Are your 1:48 gas station attendants handing out any dinosaur soap? 

George

Again, Thanks everyone!

Regarding service attendants: I did locate some Artista figures that may work. I will buy them when I'm ready to insert this into the layout. Speaking of which, I better be in the basement building it.