Does anyone have a lead on where I can get larger sheets of brick surface styrene? I have a bump out that hides a concrete pier that supports the main beam. I have thought about coveing the corners to make it a little less noticeable but at 42" long it’s tuff to hide. So I figured why not the next best thing hide it with a backdrop structure. I thought of making a three sided structure out of styrene to resemble and old factory. The only problem I have is finding sheets of styrene big enough so as not to have to seam the wall. I’ve thought about doing a concrete structure out of Gatorf-board which will be the base of my brick factory but I would really like to go with the red brick if I could.
Another option is to do what buildings do in real life–they add columns to reinforce the walls. If you added a column of bricks every so often, say where your seams are, you could hide them and add additional relief to your building in appropriate ways.
In reality, a wall that long would probably be stone or poured concrete. That Scenic Express link above has stone walls 26" long on the third page. Or you could buy one pack of a shorter wall and make a mold from it and cast as many of your own as you need out of plaster.
Fact of the matter is back in the early 1900’s many factories were in excess of 300’ long made entirely of brick n mortar but we’re not here for a history lesson on masonry. My reason for looking for long sheets is merely for easy of building larger structures. I have in the past sectioned brick panels together with pilasters or piers to hide the seams but I was lookiing to get away from using too many pieces. I scratch built a large factory using DPM pieces that was a scale 175’ it came out ok but didn’t give me the look I was going for.
MicroMark sells brick paper. The package is 4 sheets, each 6x9 inches, for $8. These are embossed so you get more than just a flat sheet with a picture of bricks on it.
As Loathar has suggested, you could also get a single sheet of plastic brick and make your own mold from that, and then cast as many pieces as you’d like. I’ve done that with tile surfaces for my subways, and they came out quite well. Actually, I like the way my Hydrocal castings look a lot better than the plastic originals. The castings take paint a lot nicer, they have small-scale imperfections not present in the original, and they end up looking much more like masonry than the plastic every could.