Moana 5: Structurally Unsound

DB says: With the recent greenification of Moana, now would be a good time to make my first structures of this millenium. Yes, I'm a little rusty, and it shows, but we both know that if you were hoping to see works of art, you'd be on Leonardo DaVinci's blog and not this one.
The goods shed was formed in record time around a base of foamboard. Using a few pictures and some model wagons to guess the proportions, I cut out a floor and added walls and ends on top of this with PVA (contact glue will melt the foam in the foamboard edges). A roof of balsawood was stuck on top. In hindsight, now that it's finished, the roof pitch should be a tiny bit steeper, but there you have it.

Once the glue holding this core together had tacked a bit, some fairly fine HO scale corrugated aluminium sheet, which was found lurking in my bag of plasticard bits, was liberally applied to the the card sides of the foamboard on the visible north side, east end and the balsa roof using contact glue - one piece for each (Captain Obvious says: the one piece roof has a bend in it). As these were all big meaty shapes, I scribed in a couple of lengthwise 'join lines' on each with a knife and ruler to represent the layers of corrugated iron sheets, and not terribly well, I might add, as can be seen in the picture above.

The doors and a few bits of styrene strip were splashed on to make it look like some effort and more than ten minutes were expended constructing the shed and before everything had set, paint was already going on.

I used light gray with a few blobs of yellow in it to get the base cream colour first, and freight car brown for the door and some rust blobs. Once this had set, a wash of acrylic black brought out the corrugations, and later that evening, some light gray was drybrushed on the top of the walls to lighten things up a bit (the vertical picture in the previous Moana post shows it in the background in its darker state).

The west end (facing the staging yard) and the south side facing the station won't be visible unless you're trying really hard, and even then, only at an extreme angle, so they only received a rudimentary painting over the foamboard core (no cladding) as can be seen below. Why not do them properly you ask?

The seedy underbelly

My philosophy is that I'd rather steam through something and finish it to a reasonable standard and then get on to the next thing; than spend weeks agonising over perfecting it in the hope of an A+ mark but thus risking getting bogged down and never finishing anything. Either that or I'm lazy in a hyperactive kind of way.

Just in case you hadn't noticed, there's far too much to do in life and far too little time to do it in...

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You may recall from that last episode that I recommended the Journal's fine pictures of Moana. To record the correct Journal issue for that post I foolishly removed the magazine from the train room and then the next day had forgotten where I'd left it, so made this hash of an overbridge without pictures. Note to self: D'oh. The handrail posts are a bit widely spaced and a few details are a bit out, but luckily this won't be a terribly visible structure on the layout.

The hill it is resting on is a piece of foam painted dark colours (it will be hiding in the shadows behind the goods shed) and sprinkled with some superfine ground foam. The decks of the bridge are balsa, the pain in the patootie handrails are styrene strips, and the last of my 1:120 Preiser 1950s Slovakian Shipbuilders were added to add a little humanity. Oh the humanity.

In the next postcard from Moana: a station.