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!
