With all the talk in other postings about how expensive this hobby can get, I thought I would share this idea to help keep it cheap. I picked up some plastic recorders at WalMart for 97 cents each thinking they would make a half decent smokestack. They look like this out the package:
With a little cutting with a saw, a coat of primer and some concrete coloured paint, they can be made to look like a pretty good reinforced concrete smokestack. It scales out to about 40 feet tall in HO.
I need to add a small cover over the wind hole that is visible at the base…it can be an access hatch…and I have to give it a dusting to make it look more sooty.
Its not a foreground model, but it will look pretty good in the background.
Anyone else have some ideas for cheap details like this?
Bob
Now that’s thinking outside the big-box!
There is no end to the interesting items that can be produced from “cheap stuff” from stores other than the hobby shop. This is a grand old tradition in model railroading: the more I read vintage Model Railroader issues (forties and fifties) the more I see tips, tricks and suggestions based on household items or what used to be called “five and dime” store items (but are still pretty cheap) turned to railroad purposes. These lessons were largely forgotten, or never learned, by those of us raised with big bulging hobby stores filled with detail items, but in lean times it helps if you can go “back to basics.”
My own favorite cheap strategy is buying my styrene in giant sheets from a local plastics distributor instead of the small sheets sold at the hobby shop–except for specially scribed or textured styrene. I’m not quite cheap enough to scribe siding into a 4x8 foot sheet of plastic!
I have often been told that often times its not the amount of detail something has to make it believable, Its if it has the right shape. If you can get the right shape, you can pull off model magic.
James