CandO Workbench

[Dad-1]

'Curse a little' Beware Grandchildren have ears.
Anyway cursing is only allowed when you cut yourself !!

You have my admiration, in fact all who work in 'N' it's
all so small a fiddly and that looks grand.

Geoff T.

[CandO]

Hi Dad-1, thanks for the comment....I did think once or twice why I was doing it in N gauge myself!!

Anyways, I'm starting on the next scratchbuild soon which is a little bit bigger and hopefully it will be a bit easier to do.....

......hopefully!

[CandO]

Hello there!! Well the other night I actually got back to doing something and started my very first Metcalfe kit....the Stone Built Terraced Houses. Now I don't know where Metcalfe got the original design from (although I seem to remember similar in York) but the kit looks nothing like the 'two up, two down' terraces that grace the streets of Lancashire so I decided to add some modifications. I kept the front façade despite the three windows as I didn’t want to complicate the entire process but the back was definitely going to have to change.

The Metcalfe Kit

For the first part of the build I followed the instructions to the letter. When the main building structure was virtually assemblel I decided to begin my alteration to the rear elevation. The fact you get an extra stretch of walling and slate roof for modifications is a great idea by Metcalfe and certainly helped. I carefully measured the size of the wall and cut a piece which would fit over the existing rear.

Front Elevation

Original Rear Elevation

I then drew around the rear doors and measured the exact alignment of the existing windows and marked them on my new wall. Cutting out the windows carefully and making the doors like the original build was a little fiddley but I got there in the end. I added the window panes and doors supplied with the kit and then cut some very thin strips off a white sticky label for the lintels before mounting the whole thing to the back of the building.

New Rear Elevation

New Rear Elevation in place

[CandO]

(continued)
The original roof had a cut-out at the back for the extension to nestle into so I cut the roof in half and copied the original shape without the cut-out bit onto the spare roof tiles and then assembled the roof as per the instructions. I used the ridge tiles to cover the join and darkened the white of the bend with a grey sharpie. Missed taking photo's of this bit!

My next task was to assemble the shed but it would be more of an outside loo than a shed .

The Loo/shed

I assembled the rear wall as per the instructions and then mounted the shed/loo against the yard wall so it was facing the opposite way to its intended alignment. All that was left was to add a dividing wall – I used the original extension part to do this - between the two properties and add the coping stones to the top of the walls and voila!

The New Look Rear Yard

Hope you like my first attempt at kit-bashing a Metcalfe kit….personally I’m quite pleased with the outcome. Metcalfe kits for N can be quite fiddley but the way they are assembled makes it easier and I’ll definitely be using some of the techniques for some of my scratchbuilds .

The Finished Houses

Rear View

[carnehan]

I do like it CandO. Time to move on to bigger kit bashing.

Paul

[CandO]

Thanks Carnehan

Buoyed by my relative success I'm now attempting a low relief scratch build of a local warehouse (see below)..... already dropped a clanger on the marking out by not reversing the measurements otherwise it'll look like a mirror image of the actual thing I did make a mental note of this beforehand by saying to myself 'start measuring from the right hand side' but then I read the measurements from the right too

Hargreaves Warehouse

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