looking for a good scratchbuilding book

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I want to scratchbuild chemical plants and other such larger industries… any suggestions?

2

Visit a real one and take pictures. If you call ahead and talk nice you might be able to get a plant tour. After a ground reconnaissance, try Google Earth at high res to get the ground plan. At this point you will likely find that the real plant, scaled down to HO, won’t fit on your layout. Do some selective compression, omit some of the less interesting features, shrink buildings and thin down like units. For instance a real refinery might have a tank farm with a hundred big tanks. Cut it down to 4 or five tanks. Make each tank a little smaller. Stuff like that.

3

Kalmbach has published at least 3 different books about rail-served industries, one of them has chemical plants (don’t remember which one though…)

[EDIT] Here’s a few links:

http://kalmbachcatalog.stores.yahoo.net/12256.html

http://kalmbachcatalog.stores.yahoo.net/12409.html

http://kalmbachcatalog.stores.yahoo.net/12422.html

…Then of course, there’s Dean Freytag’s Cyclopedia of Industrial Modeling with several pages devoted to tanks and piping.

4

Let me second that recommendation for the Freytag book – hugely useful and a good reminder of the excellent clinics I have seen Dean Freytag present.

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That and a Plastruct catalog and you should be in business.

Another good book, but getting harder to find, is Robert Schleicher’s Building Plastic Railroad Models, published by Kalmbach some years ago. I suppose it is the fact that Schleicher is now a “competitor” that prevents them from having him create an updated edition.

Dave Nelson

5

One other not-exactly-the-same possibility for you, would be the Art Curren kitbashing books, which would help for some of the more generic buildings (offices, storage buidlings, etc.), without having to start from totally bare plastic. Kitbashing, done well, can give you something believably realistic-looking structures, with some reduction in time spent to build some of the structures. Same way if you’re using readily available tanks and piping, rather than building those from bare stock Plastruct materials.

My [2c],

Jim in Cape Girardeau

6

I agree with Jim on the Art Current book (Kitbashing HO Model Railroad Structures, By Arthur (Art) Curren © 1988 Published by Kalmbach Publishing CO.), I have a old library copy of the book and it has valuable information, while the book has specific examples of taking kits and building them he does give you enough background technique to go on to kit bash or scratch build your own ideas. Art starts off with his version of Kitbashing and names it “kitmingling,” where he uses plastic and styrene kits to build his own versions of the model. He will divert from the printed instructions and devise his own way of putting the model together, often with more than one of the same model.

Here is a quote from the book on one way he creates a mock up of the proposed kitbash:

One “tool” you won’t find at your hobby shop is a copy machine. This is invaluable for making paper duplicates of the kit walls, which can be cut up and rearranged in various combinations prior to cutting the plastic walls. Just arrange the kit walls, detail side down, on the glass of the copy machine and place a sheet of white paper over them. If the machine has a copy darkness adjustment I usually set it for light; this shows the detail better. A dummy structure can be made from the copies to see how the final structure will fit into your layout alongside other structures.

7

The Art Curren book is indeed excellent. As Mike Tylick points out in the May issue of MR (in his own good article on kitbashing), these days the scanner can take the place of Art Curren’s copier machine – scan in the kit parts and then create the structure on screen. Interesting idea which I have not yet tried, but I bet Art Curren would have.

I attended an estate sale at Art Curren’s house after he died (so I got the kitbashing book cheap there since he had a stack of them). They guy never threw away any parts – bags full of bits of buildings, many of them the famous Mt Vernon Manufacturing that LifeLike is still selling. I was able to buy a bag or two of his parts and bits. I did not have the money with me to buy any of his buildings, but a friend of mine bought some beauties.

Dave Nelson