A Space Needing Filling
As nice as it was, the bare wall of my TimeCast barn annex (see Post 53) was looking back at me like a vacant Pratzen height to an up-and-coming Napoleon – a big space needing to be filled. I decided on a self-build small livestock enclosure – a DIY pigsty. I thought most folk of this period who could would have kept the odd pig, chicken or goat to supplement their larder and that there should be some evidence of this – not just with this farm-type building. I began by creating some walls. I used Instant Mold to make a mould of an N scale rough-stone wall plastic sheet. I pushed some Milliput epoxy putty into the mould and scored off and fashioned the exposed side in a rough stone styley with an old knife blade. The idea at this stage was that my quickly sculpted side would be the inner side of the wall which would be almost invisible when the wall sections were fitted together. When the putty had set hard it came off the mould very easily. Close up, there was no beating the impression of the plastic sheet but I rather liked the chunky roughness of my speedy sculpt.
I glued the walls to a thin piece of card as a working base. I used balsa wood as
supports for a moulded plastic tile sheet roof and a piece of cocktail stick roughed
up as an end post. I cut a piece off a strip of N scale station fencing – the high
fencing type that is made to clip onto the back of station platforms.
With it, I made a small fence and added some
card-strip batons to make a gate. The
ground was covered with
ready-mixed grout –
all churned
up like a
pigsty.
POST 56
56
