Claude,
I applaud your work on the new building. Having built some doll houses for people I can relate to the shingles. It takes a lot of time.
But I must admit,my eye is still drawn to that awesome Willow tree. Spectacular!
J

Thanks Jerry. Oh, the hours i mentioned were for the gutters only. The shingle work is for two weeks!
One side of the roof and then i have only one (albeit a big one) house covering left to finish the dio. Will and this adventure probably with 40000 shingles put on the roofs!

Claude

Claude, that big house is pretty impressive! All those windows! Yikes!

2 questions for you:

1. What did you use to make the molds for your windows? Is it some sort of plastic resin?

and 2. Can you explain a little how you make your roofs? What are the measurements of the wood pieces you use for joists and such?

I will be starting work on some roofing here soon, so I wanted to ask you and see if you could shed some light.

Hi Claude,

Masterful work from a master of the hobby. Outstanding!

Garth

Thanks Garth, glad you like it. Did a lot of work this weekend again, mostly redoing things i did not like. Since i need glasses for my detail work i see my own mistakes even better and never stop redoing things. Takes even longer to finish a house now.

Hi Brandi




The stuff to make the moulds is silicone mold rubber, similar to this one
http://www.micromark.com/One-To-One-and-Rapid-Mold-Rubber-32-fl-oz,7883.html
After that you are using casting resin to make the copy.






Uh, this answer could cover a few pages of a book :-)

How to make a roof is impossible to answer here in a message reply. You have my book i think? Please go through it once more, there are plenty of pictures featuring parts of roofs, giving you an idea how to mount it.
Look at other posters builds, more importantly and very simple, climb in your attic and look at the roof structure of your own house!
There is a lot of simple logic in this builds. The size of the roof is also a simple matter of look to the entire house. It has to please the eye!
You know that i am using fire rocket sticks for joists and such.
They come in sizes going from 6 to 10 mm ( means 20-30 cm in real) I am using them according to the level of support they must provide to the roof structure. I may also cut them length wise wih my circular saw if i need something thinner.
The rafters can be made with Balsa wood to a size of 3x1 mm for example

This picture helped me a lot when i started building scale houses


It's from a book, so i hope this limited use is ok with copyright. I think it's out of print anyway.

(otherwise my Kitmaker gallery is not up to date)

So stop looking for ideas and start building. Don't glue it on the walls so you can always restart anew and post it here for more help.

Hope this helped a bit

Claude

Claude I continue to be amazed by the massive nature of your build! Looking forward to getting back to building again myself soon. have to make a room to build in in the new place. looking forward to your next update

Dave

Hi Claude,
Thanks a lot! That picture helps. Of course I go through your book very often, and I have others, too, that I use as well.

Thanks for the help, Claude

I keep watching this wonderful work.

Congratulations Claude.

Hi Claude,

I am just about to start embarking on making some modifications to a very small dio I am going to do. I need to pic your brains regarding drain pipes. I thought I'd use some plastic tube for the down pipe with a little bend near the top where the builing has sustained some bomb damage. How do you make you brackets? what shape are they? are they much like modern ones? colour bare metal or just plain black?

I bow to your experience and knowledge on this one.


Paul

Everytime I pop in, I find another building done The latest, the big one is pretty cool, but that's the fountain I really look forward to now..

Me too! Sculpting a 1/200 figure and that 4 times please and doing all those round shapes on top where it probably would be best to own a lathe ( i do not), this will be a challenging little project. [Sarcasm end]
Thanks for looking!

Paul, to much honor, really.
I am not doing a biggie out of every little detail.
My three last houses need pipes too and they are in fact on my working plan for the next days.
I am using 3 mm Evergreen tube. This is very hard and has the advantage that i can stick a 1 mm wire in it, allowing it to be bend some more without breaking.
My connections to the gutter are some 135th Construction Battalion fittings. I am slowly running out of stock and need to find something else as i think they are OOP.
For the brackets i have no idea about historical correctness. I am flatening a thin copper wire in the Pasta machine ( the end wide is no more then 1 mm) bend it around the tube to get the correct round shape and bend it at 90° at the backside to go in the wall. I sharpen this end a bit to limit the hole size i need to drill in the wall.
Painting is even more basic. I am spraying it (everything, the gutter, the pipes also) with Tamiya gray primer. This gray color is not far from what i think is good enough for those metal parts. Sometimes i need to fix a few parts already glued on but then i am trying to find a grey color not far from the Tamiya one. I add more or less Raw Umber oil washes and that's it.
Until now nobody had any complaint about my style, so i figure that it is really good enough. I make no religion about pipe brackets!
If you use lead wire you may not need the Pasta machine as flatening may work without, getting it regular is more difficult then.
Hope it helps!

Rodrigo, Dave , thanks for loooking!

I lately forget again to take photos about what i do as i am so immerged in it that i do not interrupt fo photo sessions. I will start to paint the lower stone part now and will then be able to fix the stairs. The pipes comes next and this will be done, nearly.

There are some nice railings on the house and i photoshoped them out of pictures and am just now using a etching service to make me a copy of it.
Yes, JBA, no photoetching from me as i figured out that investing all the energy you did already in learning and mastering that speciality is not worth it for me at this point as i will not need any other photoetching parts for at least a few years after this one. ( i included a railing for the next house to build in this order also)

Pictures soon!

Claude

Claude that helps a lotr thanks, it really confirms that what I was thinking will do, Love the idea of the pasta maker! that had me rolling on the floor.

I will just have to make up some brackets out of some lead foil I have or maybe some excess photo etch maybe. As for the top it will be destroyed so I don't have to worry about it.

Paul

P.s you could try netmerchants here in the UK for the 135th Construction Battalion fittings they used to stock them and may still have stock.

Glad it does.
Yep, the photoetch is a good idea. I do not have a lot of this so i never remember that solution.

Stated simply all I can feel upon viewing your progress is WOW! Will be following this closely. Love the combined efforts of research/planning/building. And a great idea!

Thanks Dave!

Here is the railing i commissioned

The original

I photoshoped the railing out of the picture and gave it to a photoetching service. I just got it back on Friday. I must say, i like it :-)


The railing for Bouvier (fronts and sides)are on top, below you find the lion who is part of the facade for the bile shop (it is in fact the old Peugeot sign) and on the right side you see already a railing for the Villa Prüm, the last house i will build next year. This all took a lot of hours to extract from pictures!

Here is what i did not copy the original baluster

It's a needle i surrounded with thin brass wire ( 7-8 or so) , topped with two additional needle heads and a piece of plasticcard (punched out) for the feet.

For the balcony support

i made this one

a piece of wood, 0.25 lead wire, plastic and putty.
It will look better once it gets a regular cover with Tamiya putty.

Have a nice week

Claude

DUDE!!!!
That balcony stuff all rocks!! The PE,the uprights and the supports are all very very cool. Maybe a little more tweeking on the top of the corner uprights? More onion shaped?
This is awesome. The master at work.
J

Thanks Jerry!
I have finally finished this house after three months of daily work on it!

The house has 31 windows to fit with 62 shutters, meaning 124 hinges.

See where the time was invested :-(

I put of course a lot of time into my photoetched railings.
I make it short, it's sunday and my writing isn't good today, so i hope you enjoy this pictures.
I will answer questions as they come.
The side railing, the right part i soldered. Getting it to fit my stair was not easy



Side and front

Side and back

a bit closer


The front alone


closer to show the Roman numbers over the door. It means the house is from 1846! It was already nearly 100 old in the war.


I would really enjoy some comments

Claude

Hallo Claude,
was soll man da noch sagen. Ein faszinierendes und riesiges Dio mit einer extremen Detailtreue. Ich bewundere Deine Arbeit schon seit Jahren. Absolut gute Techniken und einmalige Ausführung.
Ein Highlight der gesamten Modell- und Dioramenbauszene!!!!
Meine aufrichtigen Gratulationen zu diesem grandiosen Werk
Viele, liebe Grüße
Frank

Great work as always Claude. No matter how big this gets and will achieve many WOWs because of its size, its your attention to detail that makes it great. The "do overs" may take time now, but when you actually finish it, it is the detail quality that will makes this a master piece.

Claude, still going strong! Sometimes it's hard to say whether the pic is a reference or a progress shot... Need I say more?

Cheers!
Stefan

I think that those 3 months were well spent. You did not waste your time here as it is magnificent.
The last picture is so good that there is no way my practiced eye can tell if it is real or model. Bravo!!! Olympic Gold.
J

Hi Claude, very good looking railing!!!
The result looks very outstanding attached to the house with this fine-detailed PE-parts!
Very realistic appearance and great work - until now!

Hi Frank from Baden-Württemberg!
In english please.
But I know, that he read/write and speak german too... but most of us modelers don´t.
If you need some help with translations, I can give you http://www.bing.com/translator/ as an help.


greetings...
Soeren

Thank you very much everyone!
I am indeed pretty satisfied how this turns out. At the start i was not so enthousiastic to build that massive house, not sure how it would fit and look.

Next steps:
I still need to do some waterwork on the last modul. Last fall i wanted to do that in order to use up my resin, well, it's nearly fall again and it is still not done.
I have a slight organisation schedule problem now as i would need to work with one Village module ( adapting and changing some cobbles, eliminating a wall who was temporary anyway) but i need of course that modul in October for the expo. There are only 10 weeks to go, interrrupted by holidays and expo preparation, so i do not want tu put myself in stress here and will occupy myself with other stuff.
The fountain, finishing detail work on the farmer's house, a tree... ok, you get the picture.

Thanks for looking and still be with me

Claude

Yo Claude,

Deep respect!

Greetz Nico

The railings are excellent. Looking forward to seeing it all put together.