Scratchbuilding an Australian Fibro Skillion Roof Cottage

These buildings used to be very ubiquitous along the east coast of Australia, they could also be found inland too. They are a type of building that has been slowly disappearing over the last few years and I wanted one on my layout. There is no commercial version of this made, so I decided that my second ever complete scratch build was going to be my first house.
First, start with inspiration, there are 2 left in our suburb that I know about. This is an example in a street around the corner from me.

What I like about these buildings is first and foremost the angle of the roof, and often the stepped back front. Sometimes the roof is stepped back, but this real world example doesn't have this.
More to follow
Cheers
Tony

 

One of the hardest parts of scratch building is the design, and the part that can take a lot of time. For the dimensions of the building i started off with a floorplan.It is a 2 bedroom house, with fairly generous bedroom sizes, a lounge/dining, kitchen and a bathroom between the two bedrooms. This determines the footprint of the house. The height of ceiling is chosen to be the same as a similar house. As long as I am not making an exact model of an actual house this method works well. The tricky bit was the roof angle. Not being able to directly measure the heights and lengths, or directly put an adjustable spirit level on the roofline of someone else's house; I had to come up with another method. Photography won't work well as I am looking at a very oblique angle down the side of the house. I could set up my survey total station in front of the house and take some measurements, but this could also generate some uncomfortable questions. In my work as a surveyor we do a lot of 3D laser scanning. I have used this already on some of our rail based projects, such as the whole length of the blue mountains line and Redfern station. This time I knew we had the data from some houses on some jobs we did for road based work. I can pull a cross-section out the the data and spin it around so that it is flat. I grabbed the data off a house in Milton the south coast of NSW. The below image is a similar house in Dora Creek NSW Hunter region.

Once i was happy with the basic concept i then drew the whole thing out in 1:87 scale onto light cardboard to test for proof of concept. This would also allow the selection and checking of the windows appropriate for the job. Most windows available for the scratchbuilder are often older style with many panes, and large and ornate. Finding simple 1960's windows is a bit of an ask. There is a local company in Aus who makes some Australian standard window sizes and I have one of their packs, but nothing really grabbed my attention. But a bit of rummaging in my box of windows and another trip to Woodpecker Model Railways in Sydney gave me something I was quite happy with. I then stuck these on with magic tape to get a feel of how they would look.

Once i had this sorted i stuck the pieces together to see how the whole thing sat for size.

Cheers
Tony

 

Once i had the dimensions sorted it was time to cut all the wall panels. For the real thing I am not using cardboard, not a good idea in Sydney humidity. I am using 1mm thick evergreen styrene sheet. This is just a simple matter of marking out and scribing and breaking.A sharp knife is a must. I don't use X-acto, when cutting like this it takes a very good tip of the knife, and this wears fast, I personally find that the snap off blade system is much more economical. The main tip here is to use good brand refills, such as Stanley or Milwaukee. Cheap ones break off nastily at the tip and don't cut well by my technique. A small steel ruler that doesn't slip is very handy, my Lufkin brand one works very well, the Toledo one slips a lot for some reason. Other handy tools for marking out is this Master Tools brand T-square, it is brilliant.

At this point i decided i wanted the building to be on a brick foundation. Looking at my brick sheets 3 bricks height for this looked good and that was 4mm in height.
The brick foundations are generally inset to the fibro cladding of the house, so I had to make the fibro panels 4mm shorter than originally designed. This was to keep the whole house the same height. The brick sheets I am using are not structural, they have a lot more flex and aren't 1mm in thickness, so i placed a backing panel to hold them in, the backing panel takes the weight of the building while holding the brick sheets in place.

I decided to make the foundations simpler by enclosing the under porch area, making the actual footprint rectangular with no cut-outs.
Windows were all cut before the walls were glued to each other. Accurate cutting here is essential, the T-sqaure comes into its own.Most of the windows i used for this job fit from the outside of the building and have a slight overlap, so any slight imperfection in cutting the window can be covered up.
Windows are cut with very close attention paid to the outer 4 edges. However, i do not want to cut through the styrene in one go, i want to score and snap, so diagonal cuts to each corner are made. Each cut starts from the corner and goes into the centre, these cuts can be done free-hand, the only thing that matters is the start point at the corner, which is quite easy to do, the knife is then dragged to the middle ish, and should be met by the other 3 cuts from the other 3 corners. These cuts should cut all the way through, it doesn't matter if they are a bit wavy. This way you will have made 4 triangles that can be punched out, leaving a good square edge for the window. Here is a picture from my last build using this technique.

To cover the edges of the stern at the corners I used 1.5mm L section styrene to mimic the batten as the edges of fibrosheets are generally not left exposed in real life.I often used this technique for my weatherboard constructions but with a bigger L shape. The larger L shape become structural, holding the two walls together when glued. But the 1.5mm does not give enough, so some square rod was used on the inside corners. The larger L shape was able to be used near the front door as it would not be seen.

Cheers
Tony

 

The next job with the house is to make it look like it has fibro sheets that make the cladding, rather than just plain styrene sides. This is achieved by adding battens, which in real life would seal the gap between the sheets. The smallest evergreen strip is 0.25x0.5mm, which is close to the limit of working with it, as it is so small, but possibly overscale, but these sort of compromises have to be made I suppose.
The windows are placed from the front into their cutouts, they therefore have a bit of overhang, I want the battens to butt up to the edge of the window, not being ready to glue the window frames in yet i held them in with sticky tape from the rear.
Normal Tamiya thin styrene glue is very fast, a while ago while there was a shortage of this, I bought a bottle of their citrus oil based one, it smells much better than the other stuff, but it is a little slow to hold, so not usually good for my building style. But in this case it worked well, giving me time to re-position the tiny featherweight pice of plastic if it moved when the glue came near it.

There is a fair bit of variation in real life as to where the battens go, I went with what looked pleasing to the eye and followed common placement of these battens.
Cutting and gluing all these was a real exercise in patience.
Once they were in the roof was added, evergreen metal siding in standard Australian corrugated iron size. Barge boards of 2.5mm angle were added and a tiny roof over the front door.

Next is to add a small laundry at the rear, then remove the windows and spray prime the house shell. Not adding a chimney to this one, but might have a window-rattler aircon, and exhaust fan hood and hot water heater.
Cheers
Tony