Finished - Calamity's Newspaper Office

[Heisler]

The is the first of three or four buildings that I'm scratchbuilding for my wild west town of Calamity. The driving concept behind Calamity is a display board to be used at conventions to promote my local miniatures gaming club (The League of Extraordinary Gamers or LEG). I want it to be the kind of board that really draws people in and gets them fired up to learn and play a game and get introduced to miniature games. With that in mind my builds tend to be a bit more involved than you would ordinarily put into a building meant for gaming. That goes for all of my laser cut buildings as well, all will be dressed up when I start building the boards themselves.

I opted for styrene plastic as my main material. Its easy to work with, readily available and the core plastic I can pick up for free from one of my friends in the banner printing business. This also allows me to use commercially available doors and windows from the local model railroad store.

The Calamity Newspaper Office (although it could serve as anything, even a saloon) is based on plans from one of my model railroad books "Structures of the Early West", 2nd edition 1994, Joseph Crea and Elwood Bell, and is still standing in Crested Butte Colorado (its a restaurant now, another friend has eaten there and says they have great burgers). I don't think that this book is in print anymore but if you can find a copy it has a lot of different buildings in it. This building is built to 1/56th scale, which is about as close to correct as we get for our miniatures. The doors are all O Scale, or 1/48th scale, from Grandt Line as are the windows. I found that the S Scale, or 1/64th scale, doors were a bit to small in most cases but the S Scale windows work quite well. But the building proportions themselves are all set to 1/56th.

Here is a picture of the building as it stands right now before any, major, exterior painting has been started. There is some test color for my weathered undercoat on the back wall, which I rather like.







I have been covering building the Newspaper Office on my blog. Here are the links from prototype to completed model if you would like to see this building's journey from matt board to final assembly. These are in sequence from start to current:

http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/12/calamity-prototype-building-newspaper.html
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/12/calamity-prototype-buildings-moving.html
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/12/calamity-newspaper-office-cutting-parts.html
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/12/calamity-newspaper-office-time-for-some.html
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/12/calamity-newspaper-office-doors-and-more.html
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/12/calamity-newspaper-office-interior-work.html
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2014/01/calamity-newspaper-office-final-assembly.html

[majorsmith]

excellent work, its looking very impressive

[Mindenbrush]

Very nicely done 

[Mason]

Oooh!
Very nice.
Very, very nice indeed!
 

[Elbows]

Lovely - particularly the addition at the back...those small additions which change the overall shape from square/rectangle to something more really change the feel and look of the table.  It's one of the reasons I buy so many small shacks and sheds...much more variety in the play space.  Excellent work!

[FramFramson]

Are those shingles the ones from wildwestmodels.com?

[Heisler]

Are those shingles the ones from wildwestmodels.com?

Yes, they are. Those are their O scale  shake shingles.

[FramFramson]

I've been seriously thinking of buying some soon. Very glad to get some nice pictures like that.

[Constable Bertrand]

  

Very nice Kris. Your blog is full of good tips, you certainly make it look easy.

I like your interior wood panneling and chair rail. It finishes it of very nicely. But perhaps consider going to a cheap local office store to print out your wallpaper files. They will make it look like a thousand bucks!

Cheers
Matt

[Heisler]

I've been seriously thinking of buying some soon. Very glad to get some nice pictures like that.

If it helps you can see them on my Aetherworks Marshal's Office: http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/02/building-calamity-marshals-office.html

 

Very nice Kris. Your blog is full of good tips, you certainly make it look easy.

I like your interior wood panneling and chair rail. It finishes it of very nicely. But perhaps consider going to a cheap local office store to print out your wallpaper files. They will make it look like a thousand bucks!

Cheers
Matt

That's a good idea, I just need to get them scaled down and on a thumb drive.

[FramFramson]

Ah, I gather than you added some additional paint to the shingles then?

Say, how thick would you say they are? Oddly, in the newspaper shop photos in this thread they look thicker than they do in the photos of the marshal's office. Are they just paper (even if it's "nice" paper) or are they on some thin card, like cereal box card?

[Heisler]

I do paint the shingles to get some color variation and to fade them a bit more. They aren't paper, definitely thin card, maybe a bit thinner than a cereal box so maybe 110# stock or a tad thicker.

[FramFramson]

Thanks!

[Heisler]

Thanks!

I have used a couple of other roofing products as well:
Truewood from Builders in Scale:
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/search/label/Wild%20West%20Scale%20Model%20Builders
http://www.builders-in-scale.com/bis/parts-shingles.html


Laser-Art Shingles from Branchline Trains
http://wargamesandrailroads.blogspot.com/2013/03/building-calamity-sarissa-precision_7.html
http://www.branchline-trains.com/laserart_structures/parts/shingles/shingles.html

[OSHIROmodels]

Nice to see a none mdf building for a change 

cheers

James