The Tyranny of a Self-Imposed Deadline
In general, for me and for many of us, deadlines are a good thing; they focus the mind, establish a goal, and force the setting of limits on what can be accomplished in the available time. In some cases, however, as the deadline approaches it becomes painfully apparent that the goal was entirely unrealistic, so compromises have to be made and the ultimate result is not particularly satisfying. This was the case for me over the past two weeks in building Pacific Citrus.
The story begins with postings in the Yahoo Group of the Pacific Coast Region, Coast Division, lamenting the small number of models that were displayed at the PCR's recent convention in San Luis Obispo, California. Readers were challenged to step out of a zone of comfort and start building and bringing more models to meets and conventions. The convention preceded, by just a month, the Coast Division's local meet on June 1, 2014 in San Leandro--so I set this as a deadline by which to build a model. Concurrently, a dear friend suggested that an admirable goal for at least part of 2014 is to do something that one has never done before--and for me, that thing was entering a model in a contest.
So, with less than two weeks to go before the June 1 meet, I began assembling materials and supplies for a model I had envisioned for some time. It's a freelanced Southern California citrus packing warehouse of the type seen in many different images on Jim Lancaster's excellent website. In fact, it's intentionally imitative of a background building seen on a page of Jim's site that compiles various scale models of packing houses.
I sketched out plans and got to work. I used modular styrene brick wall sections from Design Preservation Models, of three different types, for the basic structure, adding 0.125" strip styrene inside to brace the walls and establish a continuous glue line along the back. One such strip also serves as a set-in roof support, and other strips are placed in the corners inside to square them. At this point the structure was stable, but to ensure no structural issues I formed a base of 0.040 styrene and cemented the walls to it, using further bracing along the joint. This assembly was primed with Model Master gray from a spray can; I primed the windows and doors on their sprues as well, along with an entire sprue of Walthers roof details. This way, those myriad roof details are now ready for other projects.
While this part of the modeling process was straightforward, two problems rapidly arose. First, I hadn't anticipated (or remembered since my last project) the sheer number of hours that must be baked into this type of project to permit glue to dry, paint to cure, and other things to set and settle. I did the spray painting outside on the balcony, on my bistro table, with the parts on a sheet of foam core board, early in the morning to ensure still air, waited about 30 minutes for most of the solvents to evaporate, then brought the board inside. It needed a minimum of 6 to 8 hours to cure hard.
Second, in deciding to scratch build a sawtooth roof--a type of roof engineered to bring light into large spaces, and a signature element of many packing houses of this type--I bit off more than I could chew. That aspect of the project took fully two-thirds of the time, involving nearly 40 hand-cut parts that required extensive careful fitting and adjustment.
A final error was not ordering proper windows in advance for the roof, and relying on scrap-box surplus windows that I had on hand from another kit. These were nicely made, but since they dictated the profile and dimensions of the roof, I feel that that the proportions of the roof aren't quite right and that it's too tall for the substructure.
I did enjoy the detailing, though: formed wire downspouts placed correctly at the "valleys" of the roof sections, vents with decent dry-brushed rust, and good decal work using the Microscale Sunkist packing house set.
In any case, the model ultimately earned a second-place ribbon in the Coast Division model contest meet, in the Structures category, but failed to earn an AP certificate in formal peer judging. The judges contended that the paperwork didn't adequately explain what was scratch built and how the prototype was imitated, and also suggested that the weathering was inconsistent. This last comment is probably well taken and is indicative of the last-minute compromises endemic in picking a too-aggressive deadline or a too-complex project. Lesson learned. On the upside, I have a decent-looking building for my version of Santa Ana, 1958, as seen here.
