Living in South Africa, HO Scale stuff is hard to get and extremely expensive. Was wondering if any of you guru’s out there had any advice on an easy way to make window frames for the buildings I am scratchbuilding for my layout ?
Hello,
Our most recent special issue, “How To Build Realistic Layouts 4, Trackside town and city scenery” (click on “Shop” above to order) includes instructions from master scratchbuilder Logan Holtgrewe on how to spraypaint window mullions onto clear styrene. If you can do that, the window frames and sash are easy to model with stripwood, cardstick, or styrene.
Good luck with your layout,
Andy
My wife is into crafts too, so I get to see some of the things she works on and the materials she uses. If the buildings are not going to be right up front, how about using some plastic canvas material? You could cut the outside to size, and then cut out however much of the inside grid that you need to. Of course it helps to keep things centered, so it would take some counting of the squares to make sure the mullions were centered.
Draw them on clear stock with a Sharpie permanent marker. An “ultrafine” works pretty well.Styrene would be nice, but I have used pack bubbles, dulled on one side with very fine sand paper. These are probably polyethylene of some sort. Here’s a sample:
The brick paper was cheap, too, bought from Scalescenes.com and printed out.
You can make as many copies as you want.
To draw the windows, first use a ruler and draw one on a piece of white paper or card, then overlay the plastic and trace the lines using the Sharpie and a ruler.
Another thing you can do is build up windows. They can be laminated from cut-out layers of flat stock, as done indifferently and photographed horribly here:
or you can cut out a bunch of strips and build them up that way.
I saw some nice scratch built windows using very small cross section L shaped Plastruct, with the corners beveled or mortized or whatever the word would be.
If you can track down the article, the November 1963 issue of MR had THE classic article on scratchbuilding nice looking windows: Taking Pains With Panes by Joe Kunzelmann. He followed it up with a similar article on doors.
Dave Nelson
I believe you are looking for “mitered.”[:)]
Wow ! Thanks guy’s for the prompt and varied responses. I am going to get started on my windows this weekend.
I do believe you’re right! [D)]
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Dave Nelson