Free-moN: At Home & On The Road

[CodyO]

One thing I never liked about those DPM buildings was the windows molded in.
Lucky my dad doesn`t seem to mind painting them all by hand I just find that to be a bit of a chore

So far looks good!

[poppy2201]

M.C., I have a question for you.  In the other forum you discussed the use of the Rockler levelers.  I'm going to be using L-shaped legs on my layout and I'm thinking of 6" or 8" piece of 2x2's glued and secured with screws on the inside of the legs.  Will a 2x2 be wide enough to accept and secure the fixed plate of the Rockler leveler?

[M.C. Fujiwara]

just curious.. why do you need to thin it with water at all?  I always use spackle for roads.. but I just mix in the black paint and stir it up and spread it on.  Is the water just for ease of application?

Just so it gets in all the nooks and crannies so that when I sand there aren't any surprise holes created by air pocket.
Also (in theory) it's self-leveling 

Poppy: 2"x2"s are really about 1 1/2" x 1 1/2", and that's too small for the screws at the leveler base-plate.
However, when you put the 2"x2" inside an L-girder leg and make everything flush at the bottom, the whole unit is enough for the base plates.
I just added a small L around the 2"x2" when I added levelers to my legs (much better than bolts in t-nuts!):





Alrighty, been slowly creating some industries / industrial scenes on two of the 45 deg modules:



The two modules can join together to create a short through siding / runaround.

The industry on the far module will be a freight house:



While I'm still trying to figure out what these two will be:





One (the two-story thing) is rail-served and kinda like a furniture factory (Three Bears Furniture?) [hmm, forgot to put the awnings up over the loading docks], while the other is a truck-served fenced lot.
Thinking pipes or just piles of dirt, rocks, gravel, fertilizer ???
Any suggestions appreciated 

Did put a couple of posters up on the smaller building, so thought I'd make another "How To" video:

[video takes longer than to do the frickin' posters!]

Am trying to get these two scenes done before the GTE show in Richmond, CA next weekend.

Thanks for looking.

[MichaelWinicki]

Nicely done video M.C.

[LKOrailroad]

Nicely done video M.C.

Everything M.C. does is nicely done. And he is fast. Funky Monkey is a layout making machine.

[packers#1]

Why not do a california speed shop with some rad roadsters and bad to the bone muscle out front? 
MOPAR or No Car 

[davidgray1974]

Fantastic Video MC!  This is very helpful!   

[M.C. Fujiwara]

Why not do a california speed shop with some rad roadsters and bad to the bone muscle out front? 
MOPAR or No Car 

Actually not a bad idea (I was thinking junked cars).
Last year I did some consulting for Art Himsl

http://arthimsl.com/

(who, in addition to wanting to improve the O stuff running around his "man cave", also scratch built a 7.5" live steamer in his early 70's)
And his collection of amazing muscle cars and zepplin and odd-o cars would make a cool composition.
Though a little garrish.

I really was thinking piles of manure:





Easy to model, fun to show off some mechanical loaders, and think of the fun with the "name game"?

Any other suggestions for that thin, fenced-off area appreciated.
Pallets of lumber?
Pipe?
A whole lot of garden gnomes?

[packers#1]

Noice noice

Manure works

Another idea would be storage for a sanitation company's dumpsters. Back when I worked at Tyler's Sanitation a couple of years ago, they had a bunch of eight yard dumpsters in one spot, a backlog of 20 yarders with construction material and horse crap and other various loads, some 10 yards along the fence, and weeds growing in a bunch of old dumpsters that would be cut up for patching steel or have their lids salvaged...a sucky job, because they always seemed to want the lids right after it rained and there was standing water and mud everywhere and the leftover trash was ripe 

http://binged.it/132BfEP
http://binged.it/137jJOW

The building you have could probably pass as functioning as the small building at the back or the building with the rusted roof; trash karts were/are stored in them. The back one was/is in much worse shape, and holds karts with circles cut in the lid (ala county fair style), and is smaller. One other possible detail, is for whatever reason, the bing aerial views don't show it, but there are a pair of older trucks on the property; a two axle Ford from maybe the 70's or 80's, and then an newer, bigger Ford is mothballed beside the back building (maybe 80's or 90's). I don't think I can get pics for you since i don't work there anymore, but really any older truck will work.

[Philip H]

Architectural salvage yard.  You'd have a chance to use dozens of grandt line window castings for something, and it would force DKS to release a clawfoot tub casting.

Then you could add a ReStore Truck with a miniature Lee standing beside it . . . salivating . . .

[DKS]

Ceramics. Often such industries will have a large "bone pile" in the back, so start mass-producing resin castings of sinks, tubs, toilets, etc. to populate it.

[M.C. Fujiwara]

Ceramics. Often such industries will have a large "bone pile" in the back, so start mass-producing resin castings of sinks, tubs, toilets, etc. to populate it.

That made me think of the Aw Pottery "boneyard" I see next to the freeway on the way to the Oakland Airport and Coliseum.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=aw+pottery+oakland&hl=en&ll=37.763294,-122.215133&spn=0.001631,0.002642&sll=37.763312,-122.214304&sspn=0.001643,0.002642&t=h&hq=aw+pottery&hnear=Oakland,+Alameda,+California&z=19

That would be a heck of a lot of crap to build.

Just up the street from Aw is this (what looks like a) scrap metal dealer:
http://goo.gl/maps/AnbnU

Dumpsters, some cranes, some trucks and a whole lot of piles of metallic crap.
Hmmm....

Or even a nearby electrical substation:
http://goo.gl/maps/dGN7B

[C855B]

... I really was thinking piles of manure: ...

"Bandini Mountain" (Google it) is a planned LDE for the GC&W. It was in real life a 100-foot tall pile of manure in the industrial district between the UP and ATSF yards in L.A., belonging to the Bandini Fertilizer Company. It was always good for a chuckle and rude comments when railfanning the area back in the '70s.

However, it was made locally famous in 1980 when Bandini did a TV commercial, a parody of the "Ski Big Bear" and "Ski Mammoth" promotions of the day. Their commercial started with a heavy-reverb voice-over, "Ski Bandini Mountain!", showing a fully-outfitted skier at the peak, who then attempts to schuss down, makes it about 20 feet and then falls over into the... uh... stuff. It was a riot.

Sadly, no video of the ad seems to have made it to the interwebs. At least not yet. It would normally be great fodder for one of those "Classic Funny Commercials" TV shows, but it takes too much setup since the Bandini brand was mostly just in SoCal.

[Philip H]

Mike,
you don't need ANY set-up for a guy falling over in a pile of cr@p.  yeesh.

[C855B]

Yeah, but this particular pile was an intermediate stage in the process - dried and powdered, almost ready for bagging - wasn't immediately recognizable as to what it was. It wasn't fresh plop, it looked like dark brown dirt. But everybody knew what Bandini made, so the context came with the voice-over, cut to scene of guy on pile, and the comedy executed from there.