Catwalk and Tanks

Building the catwalk

For some reason I neglected to take pictures from the start. I think I needed a battery for my little camera and didn't have any in the house. 

Pay attention to the instructions on these little parts. Ragg's has it figured out and it is easy to mess up if your eyes are as old as mine.

The underside of the catwalk has these little supports that are contoured to go on top of the tanks. There are two different types although I measured them and couldn't find a difference. I didn't have a way to measure the arc but I would have to guess that the difference is in the radius of the arc to fit the different size tanks. There are 20 of these little pieces and they go underneath the 'U' shaped section, shown on top of the weight in the following picture, and the little straight sections that will end up being on top of the larger tanks. These are to be glued on while parts are still in their carrier sheets.

The railings have use strip wood angle for the uprights. These are also glued on while the railings are in their carrier sheets and are actually cut a little longer than they will be in the end. Then a razor blade is used to trim them to the correct height. Now remove all the parts from the carrier sheets.

 The railings are glued on to the catwalks at this time and to each other. The whole structure is surprisingly rigid but fragile.

Here it is assembled, before painting. I painted mine primer grey.

 

Tanks

Start with the tanks by cleaning up any casting flash on the open end. Not much work to be done here. Then glue on the tank ends. Alene's Tack glue and the syringe supplied can be used like a caulking gun here to erase any gap between the end and the tank. Caps are glued on now as well.

Tank Supports

Each tank support is made up of three pieces. A piece that is smooth on both sides is sandwiched in between two other similar looking pieces that the instructions refer to as 'form board'. I honestly had no idea what that meant Due to all the handling of carrier sheets up to this point, while looking for other parts, that they had nearly all fallen out of their carrier sheets. examined these pieces of wood for about 24 hours before I sent an email to Ragg's wondering what a 'form board' was. Then I was looking at them and the light hit them just right and I could see a relief in some of the pieces that looked like concrete forms. Ha, imagine that. Getting old eyes. 

After gluing these pieces  together I sanded and primed and worked on them for a while to get any trace  of the joint to disappear. I was very successful on some off them and not so much on others. I may get some modelers putty and work on them some more. I experimented with the color. Concrete is hard for me to judge. I finished with Aged Concrete like the instructions say but added some grey to make it look a little less yellow. They are shown here in the little jig supplied to place the tanks in the proper location with. More on that later.

At this point, after priming the tanks I placed everything in position. The tanks are placed relative to the small warehouse using the jig. I'm not ready to glue everything down yet so I have just temporarily set up things. I still need to paint the tanks and do some weathering to everything before I continue on. Here they are with the catwalks in place.

And everything built so far.

Small Warehouse

Small Warehouse

One of the challenges of this kit, to me, is to have all the green pieces painted as you need them. I wasn't really comfortable removing everything that needed to be green at once so I pretty much did it on an as needed basis. I have a pretty nice airbrush paint station set up. Nice paint booth. Keeps all the fumes away. What I did is use some of the provided double sided tape and stuck the needed pieces down and painted them as shown.

 

Pump house. First thing to do is build the little pump house that goes onto the side of the building. Not much to say about this. The small warehouse is pretty much a smaller large warehouse and goes together about the same.

 

After covering the walls with metal in the usual fashion I test fit everything together. 

 The ends of this building, for me, was the hardest metal application for me. Between the small window, large door and small pieces, I just had a real hard time getting it to look good to my eye. After I finished the rear wall I counted up my remaining metal siding and decided to rip it all off and start over. My solution was to use 10' pieces at full height and put the smaller pieces that are angled on top of the underlying siding. It just made it look smoother.  Once again, I keep examining metal buildings in my neighborhood (airport) and all the metal overlaps but you can hardly tell it. It's just what we have to work with. Here is a building I built 10 years ago. Durango Car Barn. Roof looks about the same. Another problem is that I have had panels pop loose from the double sided tape. I've been using the syringe and Aleene's Tacky Glue to fix those.

I also found an apparent error in the instructions on the roof. It says to use 8' pieces of metal for the first course of metal. It should actually be 6' pieces. Scared me at first as I though I didn't have enough metal but every thing worked out perfectly.

 Here are some pictures with what I have finished so far in the new location on my layout that was put together for it. The garage will have to be moved to somewhere other than where the prototype was but since the prototype was actually in Dolores and mine is outside of Durango I guess I can do whatever I want. :)

 Next - Catwalk, tanks, and piping!