The writing on the wall -part 1

Almost every square inch of the original shop interior is clad in stained and varnished pine, that's every wall and all ceiling areas.

Widespread use of interior timber cladding seen in the shop 1st floor sales area

It would be very straightforward to just mark out a bunch of parallel lines or grooves on sheets of wood, but this would visually fall rather short of a convincing, quality effect.

I have employed 0.8mm thick birch plywood as my stock material and cut it into 100's of "planks" 5mm wide. But first, I applied two tones of spirit-based wood stain (Antique pine & Yellow pine). I learned this the hard way. In my tests, I cut the wood into strips, and then stained them, and of course it was VERY time-consuming.

















By cutting the material into individual planks, the various grain patterns and variations in the staining effects were broken up randomly - just like the real thing.

Even with wood as thin as this, the Proxxon was a bit slow and gave rise to slightly non-parallel planks. After much experimentation, I tried the big mother - my bandsaw.

By pinning 4 layers at a time onto 9mm plywood offcut material, the very course blade (4 tpi) gave a surprisingly clean finish. With the huge power of this machine, coupled with the wide blade, the planks were totally parallel when finished and required the minimum of bur removal afterwards.

All the solid brick walls on this model are 9mm thick and have been produced from a specialised foam that is new to me, Rohacell from Emkay Plastics Limited. It was selected after much deliberation because it take a nice impression when hand-embossing all the bricks on the exterior surfaces. More about that in a later blog.

Wall apertures such a windows and doors have been built up, rather than cut out from blank sheets material. This can be more accurate in terms of placement, and also ensures that the exposed edges can easily be made straight and square when that is a requirement. It is al too easy to allow a knife to wiggle off-square when attempting to hand-cut an aperture in sheet material.

The wood cladding for the interior is individually glued in position with cyanoacrylate adhesive, starting from a straight edge and butting each plank up close to the next. Care must be taken to avoid a gradual deviation from squareness. Repeated parallel guide lines are a good guide to keeping things square.

This is the rear wall of the shop, showing the ground floor and the first floor

walls having been clad all in one operation. Note the office window to the left 

of the picture. A few years ago this window was boarded up after a

break-in. This window was operational in 1920 - the date setting of this model.