Some recent work on the In-ko-pah RR

[Ray Dunakin]

I finally got around to finishing up the Mineral Ridge Mill. I started this building in December 2013, and had it basically completed by July 2014. But it still needed lights and interior details.

For a while I considered leaving the building empty, and just putting some lights in it to make the windows light up. Towards this end, I sprayed the inside of the glass with matte clear coat, to fog them up. I wasn't happy with it. Even with the windows fogged it would still look empty. But I didn't want to try modeling realistic milling equipment, especially when trying to fit it into a compressed structure.

The solution I came up with was to just make some "view blocks" that could be positioned near the windows and would give the impression that the structure was full of machinery, chemical vats, structural timbers, stairs, etc. Behind these, I would still have plenty of room to run wires for lights, and access the interior for maintenance if needed.

Here are a few photos of this process. The first shows one of the view block assemblies and its installation in the upper level of the mill:








Next, the middle section of the mill:




And the lower level. At the left is a small enclosed area representing the mill's office:




I made some fixtures for the building's exterior lighting. The lampshades were made from Plastruct styrene domes, carved out to a thinner profile. I made two versions, one with a short neck for use above the freight door, and two long-necked lamps to light the main and rear entrances.








One mistake I made in the original construction of the mill was using removable roofs to access the interior. The unsecured roofs warped badly. To correct this, I needed to make them a permanent part of the structure. Ideally, it would have been best to build new roofs, but that was way more work than I wanted to do and would have wasted a lot of material. So I decided to glue the original roofs in place and also use screws secure them to the walls. This would have the effect of straightening the roofs a bit. The results are not perfect but are acceptable. Then I had to add some extra bits of corrugated metal to hide the screws, as well as to cover some gaps:










Next I masked off all but the new bits for painting. I used a coat of self-etching primer followed by Rustoleum's Cold Galvanizing Compound. Later I weathered it to match the existing structure:




The sorting house on top of the mill's huge ore bin also needed to have the roof screwed and glued permanently in place. Unfortunately the openings in two of the walls, combined with the lack of a floor, caused the walls to be pulled out of shape, and it no longer fit perfectly on top of the ore bin:






The only way to fix this was to make some metal straps that could be used to hold the walls firmly in place, forcing them into shape. I made them by cutting up some small brass hinges:




You can see the metal straps in this photo. I still need to do some work to minimize the appearance of the full-scale screws:




At the very top of this structure is a place for ore carts to dump ore. I had never gotten around to making the grate, or "grizzly" for this, which screens out oversized chunks of ore, so I did it now. I still have to fill in the gap where the mine track enters to grizzly:










I also made a lamp post to shed some light on the track and grizzly:




One thing left to do is make a small trestle extending from this side of the ore bin, for dumping waste rock:




A view of the sorting house interior with the newly added lights:




As darkness falls, the lights bring the mill to life:















Looking through some of the windows:






Looking up the street towards the ore bin, sorting house, and trestles:





That's it for now. Enjoy!

[Design-HSB]

Hello Ray, uniquely beautiful and inspiring. You are lucky that the distance to you is too far for me, otherwise I would probably come up with the idea to ask you if I could look at it.

[Barney]

Very nice your are a master at creating atmosphere - and the lighting certainly makes it come to life
Barney

[finescalerr]

Most satisfactory. -- Russ

[Ray Dunakin]

Thanks guys!

Helmut, if you ever did make it to this part of the world you would be more than welcome to come see it.

[Bernhard]

Great work, Ray.
Building structures for outside seems to be a special challenge, which you have mastered excellently.

Bernhard

[Hydrostat]

Ray,

I love those night shots. The mill is very well situated in the surrounding landscape. You're right that building the whole interior would be some kind of challenge - and the mockups do the job well. Maybe you could give the windows a light greyish spray from inside to achieve an rather dusted look and to hide the mockups a bit? In those close ups they look a bit strong for what they are, given the clean window panes.

Cheers,
Volker

[TRAINS1941]

Ray that is great.  Interior really well done.  And the night shots with those lights.

As always a job well done.

Jerry

[Bill Gill]

The lighting lshows up really well and the repairs don't show at all. Good stuff.

[Lawton Maner]

If anything, hiding of the repairs just adds character to the structure.  The patches on the roof make it look as the mill has been in use for a while.

[Barney]

Inspiring atmosphere 
Barney

[Ray Dunakin]

Thanks!

I'm working on another project right now -- adding interior details and lights to the stone bank building, at the lower end of the street behind the mill. I'll post some pics when I get a bit farther along on it.

[Ray Dunakin]

The project I've been working on recently is one with very significant personal meaning...

I finished the exterior of the stone building on the left in 2013:




I designed this building to represent a former bank building which has gone through many different occupants over the years, and is currently home to a custom jewelry shop. It was intended to be a tribute to my brother Jim and his wife Maggi.

After finishing the exterior, I built the removable boxes that form the two interior rooms. Here's the room for the ground floor:





That was as far as I got -- adding lights and details to the interiors got put on hold while I worked on getting some of the other Mineral Ridge buildings put together. After the untimely deaths of my brother and his wife in 2016, I wanted to go back and finish this up, but it was much too painful emotionally. Only in the last few months have I gotten to a place where I felt ready to take it on.

The first item to complete was the door of the bank's vault. It's loosely modeled after this vault door in the ruined Nye & Ormsby Bank in Manhattan, NV:



Several parts are missing on the prototype, so I also relied on photos of similar vault doors that I found via Google.

The door and doorframe were built up on a sheet of styrene:




After trimming off excess material around the door frame, I began adding hinges and locking hardware:






Once assembled, I painted the door in an era-appropriate style. I added a slight bit of weathering and scuffs to represent typical wear on a vault in an old building which has at times been virtually abandoned. Then I glued the door assembly to the wall:




Next I made some ceiling lamps, using three different styles of acrylic beads for each lamp:




Wider holes were drilled through two of the beads to accommodate an LED. The base was sprayed with black primer, then hand painted with brass paint:




The remaining two beads were glued together, then glued to the base. Holes were drilled in the ceiling and the lamps were glued in place:




Now I need to make a display case. The lower half of the case was built using sheet and strip styrene plus a couple pieces of Sintra PVC board:




The frame for the glass front was assembled from styrene strips, using a pair of machinist's blocks to keep everything square:








The rest won't be visible so it isn't fancy:




After I painted the case, I glued a tiny LED into the inside of the display area. The wire leads run through a hole and out the back:




I used slide cover glass for the top and front of the case. It was glued in place using clear silicone sealant.




I made a small, round table using bits from an old robot model I bought years ago, plus a styrene rod and some styrene sheet material. The display bust was made of thin Sintra with styrene details.




Another display was made by cutting down a plastic cake pillar and capping the ends with thin pieces of Sintra:





Here is the finished interior:




I used real photos of my brother's jewelry for the frame photo displays on the walls. The jewelry inside the display case was made by reducing photos of his work and adding a black background. This was printed onto self-adhesive vinyl, then sprayed with flat clear coat. Then I used a very fine brush to carefully apply artist's gloss medium to each of the items, making them stand out from the flat background.



That's all on this for now, more later.

[Chuck Doan]

This is so good. A fine tribute for sure.

[Design-HSB]

Ray, a successful memory and tribute to your brother.