Scratch building a station canopy from simple and cheap materials - easy station roof build

welcome to chandwell my name is michael and this year i'm working on the station end of my inner city viaduct-based engage layout chandwell in this video i'm going to show you how i made this overall canopy for chandwell station using simple materials and easy techniques i'm going to show you some of the mistakes i made some of the things i wish i'd done differently and then also i'll show you how i'm going to fit it into the wider layout down at the station end [Music] as with all my builds i designed the trusses in inkscape and i printed them out using normal a4 paper on an inkjet printer i made a video on how i designed these trusses in inkscape and i'll link to that at the end if you haven't seen it and you're interested in it once it's printed i glue the paper to card i'm using a sheet of half millimeter grey board here that i bought from ebay so i simply cover the whole sheet in glue stick it's useful to get down to the level of the gluing so you can see the light reflecting that just shows you if you've missed any bits because it's important to cover the whole thing and not to have any bubbles or any bits where the paper starts to peel off from the card once you start cutting it once the card is satisfactorily covered in the glue it's just a case of rolling the paper on i start at one edge and just roll it down gently this avoids any air bubbles and make sure it goes on nice and smoothly with this thinner card the half millimeter card it is useful to keep a weight on it while the glue is drying otherwise it does risk the card curling slightly so i have 11 of these girders to make and each one is made of three pieces of card so it's important to get an efficient cutting regime going so start with all the horizontal lines in one direction and then all horizontal lines in the other direction and what i mean by that is i always cut so that the ruler is on top of the piece of the girder that i want to keep this just avoids any unwanted bends or tears of the card i'm using a swan morton scalpel with a 10 air blade and thank you to some advice from timbersurf on his channel i actually used the same blade for the entire build of this station canopy that has sharpened the blade on a wet stone every now and again when it needed it so once all the horizontal lines are done it's time to move on to the diagonals when it comes to the diagonals i try and do all of the ones facing in the same direction at once so i'm just moving the ruler down the page i don't want to have to keep moving from side to side around all of the edges of the triangles as ever i keep the ruler over the top of the pieces of the girder that i want to keep once all the diagonals are done in one direction i'll flip it round and do all the diagonals in the other direction always keeping the piece that i'm keeping underneath the ruler once you start joining the ends up some of the triangles that you've made start flopping out if that happens that's a bonus happy days i'll move them to one side but where the other triangles haven't automatically popped out i'll leave those for now the reason being no matter how careful you are you always have a little tiny nib of card that holds the tie that holds the triangle in place i deal with all of these at the end if you poke them out with your finger you risk tearing it and that will either tear through part of the girder or leave a little fuzzy nub of card which is really difficult to remove so i do that at the end so now it's time to remove the triangles all i do here is just very gently drop the point of the scalpel into the angle of the triangles and just cut through any little nib that's left this is by far the longest process so you can see now i'm over an hour into the cutting out of these pieces of triangles i'm nearly there though this is the last one carefully cut through the little bit of card that's holding this triangle in place it's a bit of a stubborn one this one i've i've got it stuck at three corners but just an easier case of popping it out with this tip of the blade and moving it out and there we are one hour and one minute and 26 seconds and we have the completed girders need to take extra care once it gets like this because you can see that these bits of card are being held on on little lines that are less than a couple of millimeters wide so just need to be extra careful here i often find that once you pinch through the bit that's holding it together it just pops off which is good with one final cut one hour 19 minutes and 45 seconds since starting i've got three girders cut out so once the three elements of the girder are cut out it's just a case of gluing them together i use standard pva glue it's actually craft children's craft glue from hobbycraft in a fine tip applicator i just run the glue across all of the little bits where the girders are going to stick and then gently place the top bit on top of the middle bit flip it around and repeat the process and you can see the middle bit has got the upright elements of the girder in place whereas the two outer bits don't and i did that simply to try and give the whole thing a general 3d appearance and there we are the girder is complete it's glued together i'll just use the back of my blade to make sure that the girder is all in alignment just by wiggling it down the glue doesn't dry straight away so you do get a little bit of time to make sure that everything is together correctly seem to have been cutting these out forever i've got 11 girders they look really good together i've managed to get them all the right size and shape and now it's time to start putting them together into some kind of structure that represents an overall station canopy [Music] i'm cutting out some really thin elements two millimeters tall using standard conflict packet and what these will do these will just help me guide the outer edges of the trusses once they're cut they're long and they're a little bit floppy but that's okay i'm only using these as guides once that was done it was a case of cutting out connecting elements these were made from one millimeter card and they were two millimeters high these are going to represent the pieces of the girders that join the main trusses together i want these to give the impression once it's finished then being one long girder rather than individual pieces i don't know how successful this is going to be at this point but that was my plan so one of my most useful tools are these magnetic mates from york model making they are right angles that are held together with really powerful magnets and these magnetic mates have got a little cut out set circle which is brilliant for adding glue now if i was using super glue or ooh or anything like that i'd just be able to drop it in and then continue but i'm using standard pva for everything i had five minutes so i thought i'd do this bit and get it out of the way so i just basically drop the pva onto the join like this and what that does is as it dries it soaks into the card and produces quite a strong bond so it's just a little dollop like that and then i'll leave that for an hour or two once that has dried it's still in the clamp there but the glue has moved in so i've got all of my girders i've got my glue i've got seven short girders and four long girders and i've got my little slivers of card it's a little bit like matchsticks got a pile of those and i've got my cornflake packet guides as well so now we're going to make a start here's the first girder with the glue drying and it's time to go take this out it stuck a little bit to it there but that's okay it comes away so once the right angle clamp is removed we have a nice right angle join from the serial packet guide bit and the first truss i'm going to turn it around and then what the plan is i'm going to glue the matchsticks to the inside of the guide bit that's there and then add the next girder add another matchstick to the guide and add another girder and continue that way until i've got one line of girders done first so i'm using more magnetic mates just to hold the things upright as i glue and now we cover the guide in glue and we add the first of the matchsticks making sure to keep it level with the ground so that everything is stuck to the same level if you get anything wrong at this point so if anything's slightly misaligned once the glue's dried it'll be very difficult to get it back and i didn't want to ruin the overall roof at this point so we've got the first of the matchstick girders in place it's time to add the next girder so let's add a little bit of glue to the edge of the girder and then hold it in the right place using another magnetic clamp make sure that everything is glued together as squarely and as securely as possible once that gird is in place i add the next connecting piece and because all of these connecting pieces are measured to exactly the right size i don't need to add any kind of measuring at this point let us know that if i add each individual element next to each other and i hope that it'll just all magically come out at the right size thanks to the width of these little interconnecting pieces that i'm using so i work along the line like that adding a connecting piece then a girder then a connecting piece then a girder all the while using this little bit of floppy conflict packet as a guide to help matters along i also use a lego right angled wall lego is perfect for this kind of thing it goes together absolutely square if you use double connecting pieces at the corners like this and then if we use a little clamps it keeps everything clamped down and right angled before the glue is fully dried i go back and i drop little dabs of glue on top of the actual joins and you can see here how it works you've got the conflict packet front and the girders on the inside in perfect right angles by doing this the glue soaks further into the card and i find that it makes a really really strong bond once it's finally dried i'm adding an interconnecting piece of the same card spaces in between the lower edges of the triangles and because i'm using the same size pieces they do fit in perfectly so it's just a case of putting a dab of glue on either side and then dropping them into place i use a heavy square just to keep the pressure together as it goes and what that means is that as it dries it'll dry perfectly square because of the joint being in the right place if all of the pieces of interconnecting card are exactly the same size it should just magically work out at being right angles i do keep the lego frame in place and i do use the right angle clamps as well just to make sure that everything is held in place so i continued like that along the line adding all the connecting pieces as i go and you can see here from above that it's starting to look like a roof and you can see that it is all maintaining its proper square shape this process continued you can see here the roof starting to take shape it's four triangles at the back where the station concourse will be and it's only three triangles up here at the front where the platforms are going to be i'm using the conflict packet guide on both sides just to hold it all together and i'm using the heavier metal right angles just to keep a little bit of pressure on as the glue dries to try and keep everything square these magnetic upright clamps are really good for keeping the whole girder upright because not only do we need to keep it at 90 degrees to the edges we need to make sure that it's upright as well any one of them flopping down will destroy the overall appearance so you can see here i'm adding glue to one of the interconnecting pieces just a little bit of glue on the back and then drop it onto the conflict packet guide and that is the next spacer in place so once i've got the overall shape of the roof in place i want to add the larger girders along the center of two of the triangles these are the girders that are going to run along the center of the platforms i want these to look like more substantial girders because they're essentially holding the weight of the entire roof so for that instead of it being two millimeters thick i want it to appear to be three millimeters width thick so what i'm doing is i've cut a strip of two millimeter wide one millimeter thick card and i'm putting a dab of glue down the center of each of the triangles that i want to run it so once the glue's in place i simply drop the guide on make sure it's straight make sure it's stuck down and once that's in place and that glue is dried we can flip it over and then start adding double a double layer of the spacers on top of that so i want this to be two millimeter thick by three millimeters tall so these little guides here i'm gluing them back to back so these are two millimeter thick now and two millimeter tall square section girders and they just drop into the gap between the triangles and on top of the guide card that i've already added once that all dries that'll look like a substantial girder running down the center of the entire [Music] roof so with it all glued together and constructed it was time to paint the frame i was actually very surprised at this point by how sturdy the frame was already considering it's only been held together by little matchsticks of card and it's easy to move around while painting it i started with a mid gray undercoat i just put this on quite thickly with an old brush tried to get all of the card covered in this gray once that was in place i used a mix of blue and white paint to make a kind of a duck egg blue kind of color not much of this survives in the finished roof but i wanted to get it on there just to give a hint of a color that it might have been painted way back in the past i put this paint on quite dry i put the paint onto an old brush and then brushed most of the paint back off onto a piece of paper and then just dry brushed the whole thing over this left a lot of the gray shining through and it just gave a kind of a hint of the color that might have been there in the past once that was dry i used humbrol weathering powders here i am putting the red oxide colour into the joints of the individual girders that make up the trusses i wanted to do this to make it look a little bit rusty in the joint areas that has not been maintained very well the powder goes on really nicely it's really subtle effect and in fact it possibly looks better when you first put it on than when you varnish it which i did later maybe i shouldn't have vanished it but in the end i did i make sure i don't have too much on my brush because i don't want to get it everywhere you have to wear a mask during this process because it is very very fine um this powder i used other colors of the weathering powder as well i used smoke black a brown color the darker colors the smoke and the black are just very very lightly brushed over the whole thing what that does is it collects in the crevices and in the joints and it just makes it look old and dirty in a general kind of manner quite like the way that it looks once the weathering powders were all in place i used my usual ak interactive ultra matte varnish and i brushed this on across the whole thing what this does is it blends and moves the powders around a little bit it takes away some of the subtle edges of it but it does make it look more evenly dirty if you like i quite like the way that it dries it dries an absolute matte and the powder is permanently fixed down to the structure if we take a look at it here you can see the duck egg blue elements that i haven't weathered yet and then towards the back is the element that i've done the weathering powder and the varnish to so you can see that it does look as though some of the joints are a little bit rusty the overall thing is a little bit dirty and i think it's an effect that looks well you won't see much of this because a lot of it will have glazing over the top so it's more just a suggestion than an absolutely accurate rendition of painted metal i wanted to have lighting in my roof to that end i used ten warm white wide angle leds three millimeter i decided what i would do is i'll glue them to the rear side of the main girder the fat girders that run across both of the platforms so what i did was i tested the led work first and then just used a dollop of ooh glue put it into the corner where i was fixing the led and then just literally pushed the led into the dollop of glue this was a little bit fiddly because i needed to also pull out the legs of the led so that the wire ran along the beam i held it in place for a couple of seconds and then i used one of my black plastic clamps to hold it in place before moving on to the next one once all the five leds were in place i soldered them together the legs of the leds didn't quite touch each other so i had to use a little bit of wire to join them together but that was straightforward and the wire is just thin enough to be hidden by the girder so it seemed as though it was going to work all right it was a little bit fiddly um but i used my black clamps to hold everything in place whilst i worked i kept testing the leds as i went i'll just use one i'll just use an old controller and just probe the ends of the wires into place by keeping the voltage of the controller right down low i don't need to have the resistors in place at this point and the leds survive the process i glued the wire down as i went with the ooh glue just to keep it absolutely straight against the girder continue to test as i went the leds are wired in series from the positive down at one end i then have to get the the negative wire back to the beginning the reason why i'm doing the wiring at one end is that these wires will disappear into the station building and be hidden that way so i don't need to give any thought to complex ways of hiding the wires down the columns or anything like that the downside of this effect is i have to have an extra wire running all the way back down to the start which is a little bit difficult to hide but by threading it through some of the girders like this it seems to work all right i would have preferred not to thread it through the girders like that so on on the second one i realized that if i put the return wire in first so once that return wire was in place i simply glued the leds in place on top of it a bit of a fiddly job with a drop of glue and holding it in place with my thumb and then adding a clamp it kept it in place whilst the glue dried so this side this girder is a lot neater than the original girder because i now don't have the problem of having to thread that wire back i could have thought ahead and used copper tape or something like that to make it easier but it's actually worked really well i don't know why i used white shielded wire rather than black but i did and it stuck out like a sore thumb so i painted the wires black and i painted the legs of the leds black and i also put a dollop of black paint on top of the leds in an attempt to reduce the amount of light that bleeds up out of the top of the roof once it was finished so on to something entirely new for me i've never printed onto acetate before i've ordered this inkjet compatible acetate and it says here that it's coated on one side and it'll allow the ink to dry immediately so i'm just testing it with a fountain pen i'll draw a squiggle on this side this is the uncoated side and that ink rubs off completely so that is not the coated side now this side is the corded side if i put a little squiggle on there it goes on just as nicely but it doesn't rub off at all that ink has dried instantly so i'm quite confident that this is going to work i designed the glazing panels in inkscape and i tried to fit as many of them onto one sheet of a4 as i could i'm needing to print them out in individual panels because of the cross beams that go across my roof i couldn't print out one whole sheet and place it on the roof each one has got to be cut and stuck individually so the brown has come out quite well the ink is definitely stuck there's no blurring there at all it's got an odd kind of sticky feeling to it though i can't put it on upside down because if you look at it at the back the black is more of a gray kind of color probably because of the coating so i'm going to have to have it up the right way around complete with its kind of weird resisting sticky kind of feeling so when it comes to fitting these the roof itself it's warping ever so slightly just as the glue is dried so i'm gonna have to make sure that i keep it in the clamps and press down while i put the glazing on here's the first piece that i've done a test fit on it fits absolutely perfectly i've just used normal pva glue to glue it down as well and it's dried it's dried nicely glazing doesn't go all the way up to the apex of the roof because there's a louvre on the top which is i guess what you used to use to let the smoke and the steam escape from underneath the roof panels so i'm trying to model that i'm not putting any detail across the top there because i don't think you'd ever see it once the top is in place the whole thing is clamped down while the glue dries and i expect that once all the panels are in place that will make the roof nice and rigid and not bent so i continued adding panels with it in place and with it clamped down i think with the weathering like this when all the panels are in place it's actually going to look more or less how i hoped so to add the panels then i cut each one out individually i had a thick two millimeter black border on either edge that was just glue onto the two millimeter thick girders and i had to cut out a notch to get it underneath those cross members that go across the top i use normal pva glue again it's the child's craft glue in a fine tip applicator and with the right angled lego clamps in place holding down the roof i just basically put a line of pva on the elements of the roof that we're going to hold the glazing in place the fine tip applicator helps keep just a nice thin bead of glue and it stops it from going all over the place it's much easier to work with than ooh hoo and super glue i'll always try to use pva wherever i can it's then just a case of very carefully slotting the glazing into place need to bend it slightly to get it into the gap but once it's in it just naturally falls into position one thing i started to notice though with this acetate was it's incredibly shiny this doesn't look like a dirty old roof this looks like cheap sunglasses it reflects all of the led lights that are up in the top of the cupboard pointing down onto the layout it enhances just how bendy and floppy it is it doesn't look like glazing it looks like printed acetate which is what it is so at this point i decided to take a bit of a risk i took my ak interactive matte varnish so not the ultra matte the matte because it has ever such a slight sheen to it now i just started brushing it on top of the glazing it went on and it dried in a really strange way i think the coating of the acetate reacted with it a little bit so part of it dried immediately other bits stayed in the kind of semi-dry state but i found that by applying the varnish in the direction of the printed glass panels it actually started to dry and looked like streaky dirt and it also added a kind of a white sheen to it to make it look like the glazing was frosted rather than absolute see-through so you can see here it's taking the shine right off the acetate but it's still see-through so here we have the main panels varnished you can see the difference that it makes the louvre bits that i'm putting on now aren't vanished and they're see-through and very shiny the main panels they've got kind of a dull sheen to them which is much more realistic so these top panels are put on in strips i didn't have to cut them into individual panels because there was nothing for them to thread under i did have to cut them up a little bit because despite my best efforts some of the trusses have gone out of alignment by maybe one millimeter or two in cases so i had to adjust these strips by chopping them up into smaller bits and overlapping them here and there but this one's going on as a length of three and it's worked really well [Music] so to add detail to the roof i decided i would add these two millimeter strips of what looks like riveted iron across the joins in the glazing which are currently just black so to do that i needed to make sure that these strips were exactly the same color as the paint that i'd applied so i wasn't quite sure what color to go for so i made this little color test strip with various different shades of grey it's difficult obviously to see on the computer screen what will match an actual printed element so it looks as though this one more or less matches i'm somewhere between four and five so i thought okay so i'm going to try and get it exact so i took four and five and then i also added the shade that was directly in the middle of those and i decided to call that shade 4.5 and then eventually i found a color that i was happy with matched the actual paint that i'd added that's a good technique of matching the computer printed elements to painted elements i found this wonderful aged tongue and groove board kind of texture on textures.com so i used that in inkscape to produce these end elements for the walls i originally thought i would do the triangular cut pieces to make them look like little points but when i actually got this printed and stuck to the weetabix packet i realized that each one was actually smaller than a millimeter and there was no way i was going to get my scalpel in there to cut them into individual elements so i chopped those off once they were put together they were lovely little end boards and this way this time i use a different technique for colour matching this time i mixed white black and blue paint to try and get a shade that matched the computer printing and i'm pleased to say that that worked as well so i painted the edges of the card to remove the white and brown edges this is the small elements that i used to add detail along the top sides of the roof and this is the valance itself before i painted the edges [Music] i'd been putting off thinking about the columns for the entire build it was something i was looking forward to with a kind of dread i just didn't know what to do i didn't want to buy columns because it would work out really expensive and i don't have a 3d printer or anything like that so i wanted to make them by hand the prototype i was basing it on at ilkley had square columns with with nothing fancy there was no fancy brackets at the top so i thought well i can make them by card in my usual way but in the end i found a box of cocktail sticks in the drawer it's probably been there for about 20 years i thought well put these to use they had a diameter of about two millimeters which seemed about right for what i wanted and chopped in half they were four centimeters tall which again was about right so i took my pin vise and a 1.8 millimeter drill and there's drilled a small hole in the part of the roof truss where the upright will go and i was quite pleased that i didn't destroy any part of the roof i was a little bit nervous at this point um with that drill going up into where those one millimeter bits of card join the main truss triangle i hadn't fully decided whether i was going to glue the columns to the platforms and make the roof removable and sit on top of it or whether i was going to glue the columns to the roof and make the columns removable and sit on top of the platform but as i'll as i've played and as i tried this it began to cement in my head that i was going to glue the columns to the roof and then just let it sit on the platform like this once i saw that in place i thought i was definitely on the right lines i thought the size of the columns looked about right the height of the roof looked about right based upon photographs that i'd seen of oakley so i thought i was on to the right thing here and i'd carry on from this kind of angle down here i thought the columns were going to look fine seeing the roof like this for the first time while it's standing up on these four bits of cocktail stick i was starting to get really excited after all the work that i put in this is the first time i'd actually seen the roof in place and if i get down here and look upwards out of the roof i was really excited it was exactly what i was aiming for didn't quite know what to do about the detail on the columns though at the moment they just looked like cocktail sticks sticking up so i took a bit of blue tack and i had an experiment and i thought well if i can do something like this i might be able to make the columns look a little bit more well you know column like so with a bluetack test in place i took some milliput this is the standard milliput it comes in two pieces a blue piece and a green piece and you mix them together and the act of mixing them together i guess activates the epoxy or whatever you'd call it and it makes a nice kind of clear-like substance which dries rock hard which can then be filed and painted so i took my columns which i'd which are basically just chopped in half cocktail sticks and i took my milliput and i set about trying to turn those into something that resembled actual victorian station columns it was a bit of a mess it was good fun um just took a little tiny drop a little tiny drop and pushed it onto the end of the column and then rolled it around until it looked something like what i was intending it was difficult to get them a consistent size and shape but i did my best across the 22 columns and i got there in the end so there were my columns you can see that there was inconsistency in the size of them some of them are fatter than others some of them are taller than others some of them are more scruffy than others i really wish i'd done something differently here i think the columns really let down the overall roof but it's the way i went and i might look at the columns again in future i also wanted to try and get the little triangular bits at the top of the columns which join it to the roof like i said at oakley they were very straightforward they weren't very fancy they just looked a bit like this so i cut these tiny bits of weetabix packet and started gluing them together but i soon noticed that those inconsistencies with how the cocktail sticks had joined to the roof so some of them needed to be bigger and smaller than others to make them look like they were consistent it further began to dawn on me that some of these were going to be absolutely tiny this one here i think it's it's half a one millimeter square so it's about half a square millimeter it's just ridiculous at this stage i couldn't control the card the card was delaminating and i thought considering you're never actually going to see this on the layout it was pointless so i took them back off again and decided that that was a foolish endeavor i painted the columns using the same technique as i'd used for the rest of the roof i undercoated them grey i then painted them in the same shade of blue that i'd used for the wooden edges and then i gradually lightened that blue with white paint and started to dry brush it on just to give a little bit of a feeling of weathered old aged paint i was still not happy with the blobs of milliput which by this point dried rock hard on the bottom of the columns so i used a nail file to file them down into a more consistent square kind of profile but when i first put the canopy down onto the platform with the undercut on those columns i was absolutely thrilled i thought finally this roof is looking like i intended it's going to look good no matter what happens even with the columns and i'm really really pleased with how it's turned out so the roof has gone on to the layout really nicely i'm really pleased with how the lights work they've got that lovely warm kind of dirty yellow kind of look although i am not overly happy with the columns once they're in place they do look okay especially from this normal viewing angle you can't tell just how mismatched and how floaty they are above the surface i think i will go back and readjust how i've done the columns in a future video perhaps i'm really surprised with just how sturdy the whole thing is it's very light it's very sturdy and it's very rigid it was rigid from the point that i put the first bits of matchstick style card in place really good um it got more and more rigid the more glazing that i added it highlighted a little issue the two bits of platform where i've gone from tarmac to paving haven't properly lined up i didn't notice that at the point i was doing it so i'm a bit annoyed with that it's highlighted that quite a lot so i might tidy that up at some point as well so the next step is this back wall i'm going to put some dark cloud kind of back seam in place i think because the sun never shines in chandwell as you know and then work on this back bit so here is going to be the main station building or the back of the station building and i'm going to use some copper tape and some butting out stone just to join the building to the back of the roof of the canopy so i can get rid of this temporary wiring and then the copper will just rest on top of the copper base so i can carry on removing the canopy when i need to and not having to worry about wires trailing and i can maintain that electrical contact so i don't know how high the building is going to be yet this is about just just under two stories so it's probably gonna be two stories but if you watched the previous video you'll see that my plan is to make it look as though the ground goes from ground level here to about four centimeters over this end so the ground is going up towards the back of the layout we'll see how that works i still haven't decided that i'm going to model a bridge here or not so we'll see what that works out like so that's the plan if you've liked what i've shown you please press the thumbs up button in youtube if you've got any questions or if you've got any suggestions for what i could have done differently please use the comments below and let me know i do value all of your comments so please keep them coming my next video will be my february update so please watch out for that and you'll see what else i've been up to in february so until then thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Chandwell

Views: 9,156

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Id: 297YDY5t77U

Length: 34min 52sec (2092 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021