Clever Lever

I'm finally getting around to finishing my build of Clever Models' Octagonal Gateman's Tower.

I've had the stairs done and sitting around for a long time now; I guess it's time to finish the durn fool thing.

The project of the last couple days was making the lever which operates the gates. After Googling around, I found the following image showing the proportions of the lever.

I zoomed in on just the tower, and in GIMP, I pasted the cropped image below over the Clever PDF, sizing it to get it to match the size of the upper room.

From that, I was able to get my measurements. My first attempt was made from black cardstock, which looked all wrong. Then I took some stiff wire intended for earring and jewelry making, along with the foil cap from a wine bottle, and made this:

I assembled the whole thing with CA glue, and wrapped the top and bottom with a thin strip of the wine foil cap, and added a drop of black acrylic paint to the tips of the levers to resemble the rounded ends of the handles. I think that's about as close as I can get to the prototype, given the supplies I had on hand.

Putting clear windows in this beast at HO scale is very difficult indeed; I'm getting quite a bit of squeezeout from the CA glue, but I've decided it's pretty minor, given the scale, and it looks a bit like cobwebs. Cobwebs, yeah, sure, that's the ticket!

I'll probably make the roof removable if I decide I can't see the details through the windows.

Ceci N'es Pas Une Billboard

I came across this odd billboard on a Portland history blog the other day...

Corner of NE Union (now MLK Blvd) & NE Sacramento Street, 1929.

(Via the Portland Archives and Records Center)

It's got a typical 1920s billboard frame, but that frame is simply painted onto the shiplap on the building. Naturally, I wanted to make one to put on a model building someday, so here's my take on it, dropped onto a Clever Models white shiplap background.

For reference, I used the perspective tool in GIMP to straighten out the photo. I took the frame from a print ad for billboards, and fooled around with fonts to get a fair approximation of the original. (I swiped the colors from that print ad, too.) I altered the circle quite a bit by using different fonts, then rotated it a bit to jazz the design up a little. Once I had everything nailed down the way I wanted it, I used some of my GIMP tricks to make the sign appear to be recently painted on the Clever texture.

After I finished, I zoomed in on a higher resolution version of the original, and realized the original graphic designer put a clock face in the bottom of the 15, with fifteen minutes of the hour highlighted.

By the way, about the lettering for "FURNITURE EXCHANGE"; I just spent about $30 for "Show Biz JNL" by Jeff Levine. I'd been hunting for that font for quite a while, and there's no freebie version of anything close to it. It's a really good approximation of "Bulletin Board Thick and Thin Letters" as seen in The Expert Sign Painter, and variations on this typeface turn up in a lot of signage from that era.

From The Expert Sign Painter, 1922.

Levine's "Show Biz"

UPDATE: Looking closely at more of the pictures on the Vintage Portland blog, I see that these flat billboard frames were a thing... in Portland, at least; I've never run into them before...

Also, while looking for images of workers putting up billboards, I came across a Jam Handy film on Archive.org, To Market, To Market, which was very boring, but had a LOT of information about period billboards.

Flea Circus Update #02 -- Carousel

This is the first of two carousels I've built for my flea circus. There were two things wrong with it: first, the animals are backwards relative to the direction the flags are flying, and second, the needle bearing I made for it is pretty poor and has a little more friction than I wanted. I rebuilt it with the animals corrected and a metal lamp finial as the pivot point for the needle bearing, and it spins quite nicely. 

Flea Circus Update #01 -- Strongman Pulls Down a Statue

I'm building a flea circus, updating some of the techniques documented in Walt Noon's excellent DVD tutorial, and I think I've come up with a unique strongman act, inspired by fairly recent events in the news. I'm going to have one of the fleas pull down a statue.

Here's how I see it playing out when I perform: I take out the statue, and explain that he's the former ringmaster of the circus, who was terrible and all the fleas hated him. I'll wave it around a bit, so the audience will get the idea that the statue and the plinth are all one piece. Then I'll place him on the floor of the circus, and loop a bit of rope around his neck, and give the opposite end of the rope to the strongman flea. He'll then begin tugging, and he'll pull the statue off the plinth.

Here's the first prototype...

He's Mr. Green from a Clue set. I've inserted a thumbtack in the base, and hidden a small magnet at the top of the spool. That way, I can hold him upside down, and he'll still stay attached to the plinth. Then I attached a stronger magnet to the bottom of the plinth, so I can set him down on the floor of the circus, and he'll stay put because I've either hidden a metal washer or another magnet under the floor. I'll help the flea tug on the rope with some trickery hidden under the floor. 

Once I'd tested to make sure my proof-of-concept miniature worked the way I wanted it to, I built the final statue. 

The base for this is a larger spool, painted with a faux marble finish. The figure is from a "Series of Unfortunate Events" board game, and I thought he looked passably like a circus ringmaster. He's painted with a bronze/copper mix, and given a thin wash of turquoise for the patina. TThe whole setup stands about 4" tall.

I thought about using a Confederate general, but it was more expensive to find just one of those toys than I anticipated. Anyway, the right audience members will understand the implication that this guy represents a Confederate statue.

I've built quite a few components of the circus now, and all that's left is assembly, training the fleas, and building some of the hidden mechanisms to help them do their stunts.

More to follow...

Fairy Houses

I've started to make Fairy Houses. In a lot of ways, they're more fun than conventional buildings, because I can make up the details as I go along. I don't have to measure a damn thing, and if it's a little wonky, that's a good thing.

I made this from a plastic soda bottle, some air-dry clay, cardboard and acrylic craft paint. I'm using a technique I learned from this YouTube channel: Creative Mom. By starting with a plastic or glass bottle and building on the surface, all you have to do is cut away the clay where you want a window, and HEY-PRESTO! your window is already glazed. After fitting dozens of tiny bits of clear plastic into HO-scale Tichy windows for my last commission, this is much more fun. I can bat one of these out in an enjoyable afternoon, and paint it the following day.

I started on a fairy-house-style train station to go outdoors, and for that, I started using Smooth-On Free-Form Sculpt epoxy clay, as suggested by this YouTuber: Ultimate Papier Mache. Here is the first part I completed: the ticket window.

So far, I've found it a tough medium. The "clay" is very sticky, unless you keep a lot of water on hand, and it doesn't really have clay-like qualities when you're working with it. At times, it was like trying to sculpt with warm taffy. You have to wear latex or nitrile gloves when you use it, which is a drag when you're used to using Sculpey. However, the end result is rock-solid, and I have no doubt it will stand up to harsh weather. 

Anyway, I'll keep slogging along with this new-to-me medium, and I'll see if the result sells on Etsy! 

Imitation of a Sanborn map.

For no particular reason, I decided to create the footprints of a bunch of Clever Models in the style of an old Sanborn fire insurance map. I might use these to plan a layout someday, or maybe I'm just fooling around.

Railcars! Railcars! Railcars!

Man, do I love railcars!

I found these images recently while researching 1920s trucks. They're from a Google Books scan of the trade magazine "Motor Truck: The National Authority on Power Haulage" from 1921.

The roof on this one is really good...

 I always call these sorts of things "palindromes," after a kitbashed engine built by Chris Wallas.

This last one is from another source...