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40. Are we there yet?

Well, no, not yet. But we do at least have some idea about where we are going for once.

After spending far too much time dreaming up schemes that have no immediate hope of being realised, and after having a bit of a chat with Gilly, who cut straight through all the crap as usual, we're back on notch 8 - or whatever the diesel equivalent of full steam ahead is - on 2mm finescale.

So, Coales Mill Yard was extracted from the filing system, stock and progress to date were appraised, and work restarted in earnest.

One thing I've found very helpful is that I now keep a worksheet for the layout, which is divided into strips from back to front, A to G, I think it is, and each feature has numbers, 1 up, from left to right. So the building I’m working on tonight is B2, while the structure started yesterday is D5. I'm generally working from the back forward, because that's where the Mill is. The worksheet lists each feature and then there is a section for each feature with notes and photos, task lists, and queries. I find it helps focus and lets meet work stuff out better.

So B2 is a rather odd structure visible to the left as you gaze through the main gates of my the Mill, a square brick structure with a pitched roof that widens as it goes away from you. The upper story, which is corrugated iron faced, angles out from the gable nearest to you, so that it meets the wider angle at the other end. The resulting slate roof is a very odd shape. The brick part is only about a quarter of the length of the building, the remaining ground floor being left open fronted, with a store or shelter beneath the floor above. The corrugated iron has a door and some windows, and a fair amount of damage at the lower edge.












Which brings us to the corrugated iron, and how to represent it. The ridges are tiny in this scale, but I feel they should be represented somehow. The printed card just looks like planks to me. Research suggested using a roller made from a suitable coffee lid would suffice, but not having a suitable one to hand, I turned to 3D printing, found something that had replaceable rollers to suit various scales, and found somebody to print them up for me. These will arrive soon and will be in the next episode.

I do need quite a bit of corrugated iron, some of the small buildings along the sidings are also clad and roofed with it.


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