Scratch building grain silos

Thanks Paul, but I have seen your models and they are excellent... Good to be able to sit at the table with my foot up and build away.

As for the ankle, it's getting better day by day. Walking is easier than what it was two days ago.

Thanks Ian. Only if I could work at this speed with the Townstreet plank. Maybe I should have injured my self earlier...

Cheers, Gary.

 

Last night I mentioned that I will have to place the loader feeding pipe before painting. Today it occurred to me that if the exchange shed and the elevator are two seperate items (for track cleaning purposes), I can't connect the pipe...

So, I decided to start on the painting as it was a good day in Sydney for this.

Most silos show quite clearly the rings of concrete from each individual pore as they build the levels up on the hoppers. To do this, I cut up some masking tape and laid across the hoopers and elevator with a 8' gap between each section.



Below each band of tape, I painted (very roughly) some Humbrol Track Colour (173) below the tape edge, dragging the brush downwards to create some streaking or concrete wash.



This brown enamel took about 1 1/2 hours to dry before I painted the whole silo with this :



When I purchased this, I thought that it would make a great base colour, not to mention that it will stick to plastic..! A few light coats was applied, so that the brown lines underneath would still show through.

Whilst this was outside (under cover) drying, I painted the exchange shed, inside and out. The outside was painted with Humbrol acrylic GWR/BR Green.



Although above it does look much more 'white' than what was on the cam. I can assure you it is an off white to cream colour. Still, I think that it is too white, so the airbrush was pressed into action.

Using a mix of Humbrol colours, including Desert Sand (250) , Dark Stone Matt (187), Pale Stone Matt (121) and Tank Grey Matt (67), a few coats were applied in a streaking motion from left to right. This gave the model a much more weathered look and broke up the stark creamy white colour massively.

The roof of the elevator and the cupola was painted with a wash of Tamiya J.N. Grey (XF-12), to give a washed out weathered look.

This as you would imagine dried really quickly, which gave me time to do some weathering. This included rust on the corrugated iron, grime on the roof of the hoppers, water marks below the windows and doors and down the sides of the hoppers.





The top door on the side of the elevator (above) still needs to be painted. I'm also thinking of changing the colour of the windows to a lighter grey as the dark grey stands out way too much ! The landing inside the exchange shed has been painted and the H beam and hand rails have been paint bright safety yellow.



Anyway, still a few things to add befor it finds its home on Jay Dubyew Nth Yard...

Cheers, Gary.