Factory girl
Although this is a staged photo, it shows what I have been up to minus the mess during the actual reconstruction of a sawmill. This sawmill started off as a Pola factory kit imported by Atlas over 40 years ago. The wall were originally brick with an opening on both ends for freight cars, and it had a brick out building with a tall brick smoke chimney. If you are on older modeler, you probably built one.
After about 15 years, to Americanize the building, I replaced the walls with corrugated sheet metal from Campbell Scale Models and kept the same windows and some of the internal supports. I also replaced the plastic simulated sheet metal roof with more aluminum roofing glued to sheet plastic. Unfortunately, the sheet styrene I first used with the roof sections was too thin to offer good support, and to make matter worse, I glued it with Walther's Goo. I HATE that cursed stuff! It stinks, it's messy, and it does not hold. OK, the upper roof held together, but the lower roofs sagged many scale feet and looked horrible.
The sad, beat up, old factory sat in a storage box for three years after my new layout was up and running, and other old buildings had been refurbished. I needed an American style sawmill rather than the two European style sawmills that Pola offered in the 1960's and imported by Atlas and later by Model Power. Walthers produced a sawmill first in HO, then N scale that was part of a sawmill-lumber yard-paper mill complex featured in a fabulous ad in the January 1997 Model Railroader and reviewed in the August 1997 issue.
I did not copy but drew my inspiration from the Walthers sawmill kit which is just about the same size as my old Pola factory. With nothing to lose, I ripped off the old lower roof sections and pulled off the real aluminum roofing material. Next I cut some sub-roof sections from thicker (0.040") sheet styrene from Evergreen Scale Models and bonded the Campbell roofing with J B Weld epoxy instead of that nasty Goo. The same sheet also forms the new concrete floor of the sawmill. To reinforce the building I made vertical supports of ESM styrene strips 0.040" thick and 1/4." I use the same strip stock for making internal alignment keys to position removable buildings from their bases, shore up poor building wall joints from the inside, and as a horizontal tab to keep custom made roof sections from slipping off their walls.
I do most of my cutting on the plastic cutting board originally made for sewing and smaller, more precise cuts on the adjustable Dupli-Cutter cutting jig. These days I must use an Opti-Visor to see what I'm doing, and an Ott-Lite shows me the way. When I'm not using the Ott-Lite for model work, I use it for doing my nails.
Would a factory girl dress like this? Yes! I used to supervise a group of girls in a semiconductor wafer fab facility. Some girls always dressed pretty and wore full makeup, even in a factory. Some never did, and most were in between. Quite often, the girls on my second shift would hit the clubs immediately after they left at 11 pm, and some third shift girls came to work straight from the clubs.
Factory girl
Although this is a staged photo, it shows what I have been up to minus the mess during the actual reconstruction of a sawmill. This sawmill started off as a Pola factory kit imported by Atlas over 40 years ago. The wall were originally brick with an opening on both ends for freight cars, and it had a brick out building with a tall brick smoke chimney. If you are on older modeler, you probably built one.
After about 15 years, to Americanize the building, I replaced the walls with corrugated sheet metal from Campbell Scale Models and kept the same windows and some of the internal supports. I also replaced the plastic simulated sheet metal roof with more aluminum roofing glued to sheet plastic. Unfortunately, the sheet styrene I first used with the roof sections was too thin to offer good support, and to make matter worse, I glued it with Walther's Goo. I HATE that cursed stuff! It stinks, it's messy, and it does not hold. OK, the upper roof held together, but the lower roofs sagged many scale feet and looked horrible.
The sad, beat up, old factory sat in a storage box for three years after my new layout was up and running, and other old buildings had been refurbished. I needed an American style sawmill rather than the two European style sawmills that Pola offered in the 1960's and imported by Atlas and later by Model Power. Walthers produced a sawmill first in HO, then N scale that was part of a sawmill-lumber yard-paper mill complex featured in a fabulous ad in the January 1997 Model Railroader and reviewed in the August 1997 issue.
I did not copy but drew my inspiration from the Walthers sawmill kit which is just about the same size as my old Pola factory. With nothing to lose, I ripped off the old lower roof sections and pulled off the real aluminum roofing material. Next I cut some sub-roof sections from thicker (0.040") sheet styrene from Evergreen Scale Models and bonded the Campbell roofing with J B Weld epoxy instead of that nasty Goo. The same sheet also forms the new concrete floor of the sawmill. To reinforce the building I made vertical supports of ESM styrene strips 0.040" thick and 1/4." I use the same strip stock for making internal alignment keys to position removable buildings from their bases, shore up poor building wall joints from the inside, and as a horizontal tab to keep custom made roof sections from slipping off their walls.
I do most of my cutting on the plastic cutting board originally made for sewing and smaller, more precise cuts on the adjustable Dupli-Cutter cutting jig. These days I must use an Opti-Visor to see what I'm doing, and an Ott-Lite shows me the way. When I'm not using the Ott-Lite for model work, I use it for doing my nails.
Would a factory girl dress like this? Yes! I used to supervise a group of girls in a semiconductor wafer fab facility. Some girls always dressed pretty and wore full makeup, even in a factory. Some never did, and most were in between. Quite often, the girls on my second shift would hit the clubs immediately after they left at 11 pm, and some third shift girls came to work straight from the clubs.