Scratch-building an N Gauge iron arch skew bridge

this is long code end viaduct bridge near Jewsbury this is rose back bridge near chang well this bridge is Jewsbury this bridge is Chand well welcome to Chang well in this episode I'm going to show you the stages that I went through to build this wonderful iron arched bridge based upon that one near Jewsbury I'm going to show everything from the initial design of the bridge to construction of the arches the placement of the bridge and the final finishing off I think there's something here for everybody so do watch along if you like what you see or you just want to see the continued evolution of this inner city viaduct the best engage layout and please click the subscribe button I was fascinated by this bridge when I saw it and I really wanted to make it part of the Chandler viaduct if you want to see how I did it then follow along this video as you go through the stages of its construction Stage one design the arch components all of my scratch builds start in an application called Inkscape it's a wonderful drawing tool I use it all the time I'm not going to spend very long explaining this bit but if you're interested in learning more please put a comment down below and I will do a video about it in future I started by identifying the basic shapes I'll do this pointed arch and then joined it together 11 times this will go on either side of this lovely arch here which looks about right for the size of the bridge that I photographed something a little bit possibly over scale but I've gone as small as I possibly can those are brights there that is one point three millimeters wide next I worked out how to put them together I'm going to put each girder together out of three layers of nine point five millimeter card this one on the bottom then this one on top of that and then this one on top of that I color shapes in with some textures that have downloaded from a royalty-free texture website I had a simple highlight and a simple shading just to fool the eye into thinking it's looking at something in relief in far more 3d than it really is this is a wonderful technique that's really easy to do and once it's printed out especially an N scale at this size it's really really effective I'll repeat the process on the green and it looks like this is now made out of some kind of eye beam rather than just a flat piece of green metal I print this onto mat photo paper on an inkjet printer and then stick it to 1/2 millimeter card go for the cladding glue stick and then roll the paper on give it a good roll down stage to construct the arches so we're ready to cut these out here they are they're on half a millimeter card and it's just a case of using a scalpel to cut around them these are really thin these are just one point three millimeters wide so I'm going need to be really careful here not to slice straight through them I've got nine of these to do I don't know how long it's going to take me so I've got a stopwatch here and I'm gonna time myself see how we get on so let's go first pierce the edges with a pointy tool like this scribing tool this gives the scalp of a good point to drop into and gives you clean points on the pointed arches another secret is to make sure that the scalpel is always sharp I used a new blade for each one of the nine arches and there we are it's taken just over 40 minutes to cook these three pieces out this one took the longest obviously cause it's most complex these now need to be stuck together so this one is at the back this one is going to go on top of that and then this green arched one is going to go on top of that in each of the nine arches it's going to look something like that I think that works really well and I'm happy with it let's return to the timer and get these stuck together I use normal PVA glue in a fine tip applicator and take care getting the glue into the right place I always use these little black and orange clamps to hold the things together while I'm working elsewhere even if they're only there for a few seconds it really helps the glue grab both sides of the card and 45 minutes and 14 seconds later the first arch is done I am really pleased with that it's gone together better than I could have hoped it's really sturdy it's quite solid it's got a really good feel to it it looks really delicate and which is the look I was looking for and I think it's going to work really well the underneath of the girder needs to be covered in a strip of green paper but I'll do that last once the butchers are in place Stage three workout the skew the bridge is gonna carry the railway across the river but an oblique angle so it's gone to another steam bridge this piece of paper represents where the river is going to be I've drawn around the track bed so I can plan the skew I've printed off a template here with the placement of the arches of the correct width and I've tried different variations to see which one works the best I discovered that a skew of 46 millimeters works the best so the arches move from right to left by 46 millimeters from front to back to match the rest of the viaduct the bridge needs to be 104 millimeters wide to that end I've created this template here this is the correct length and width for the bridge to fit it in and it will be the top of the bridge the underside the arches will fit on it like this and I mapped out of the correct positions for the skew as as some of my other arches have got holes here to contend with these will have the piano wires in which will control these points here so I just need to be mindful of that and don't want to have one of the uprights of the butchers is on top of the whole stage for make the buttresses design the arch to be embedded in the middle of the butcher sees I wanted to make sure that the arch would be dead center in the buttress and that will control the exact width of the bridge by calculating the exact width of the butcher's so using those calculations I've created these pieces which I'm now going to glue together and to make one single arch embedded in its buttress so I have it of these pieces these are two millimeter card there will be two on each side of the arch on each edge and I've got four of these these 1/2 millimeter card the two two plus the 1/2 or add up the exact width that the butcher's needs to be so the eventual 9 arch bridge is the correctly these bits are just spaces these are the same half mil card that the arch is made from and they're just basically going the bottom to Pat it all out so the arch gets added here and then the spacers go underneath so we should end up with a nice solid structure with the arch dead center in its butchers I also add another piece of group of the green arch on the rear but layout will never be seen from the back but just think yes I afford to graph it from there then that will cover it so lots of bits dad let's do the technique here is just the same very very carefully using a scalpel and cut out the green arch and paste it on doesn't have to be super it's just from the back and then it's a case of adding each individual piece of the butcher's I work from one side to the other flip it round then do the same on the other side building it up as I go trying to keep it as square as possible why I end up with is this it's solid it actually stands up by itself and you can see that the arch is dead center and it's butchers so that worked and it looks even better when you see them together here are the first seven all the hard work is starting to pay off from getting quite excited about how this viaduct how this arch is going to look these look absolutely fantastic so it's time to take these bare buttresses and turn them into butchers is covered in the dark random Astra texture to match the rest of the viaduct the butcher says we're going to go together like this to make the skew of the bridge so to the end I've got these three pieces got a main piece here which will wrap around the front and the inner face this piece here which will go on the inner face on the other side of the arch and this bit which should make a nice triangular stone piece to hold the arch in place the coverings are scored and pre-folded to give nice crisp edges once they fit around the buttresses this bit here I've got a little bit too big guys need to trim it off so that it fits nicely up against the inner of the white pointed arch the first task though is to sort out the straight edges on the purchases they made from several layers of card all stuck together and no matter how careful you are you always end up with a bit of a wonky line like this so in fractions of a millimeter but it does make a difference once the coverings are put on so to get rid of that let's use a simple nail file and rub it down until I've got a nice straight perpendicular smooth edge pair of tweezers like this comes in really handy when placing the coverings on the buttresses I also use these Windsor Newton or letter set Pro markers there's two colors here and what I do is I color around the white edges of the paper that just really takes away the white edge once it's in place you can't really tell that it's an extra layer of paper on top of the butcher's and then when there's a layer of varnish on top as well it really does blend it all together it's really important to get rid of those white edges of the paper this one here cool great for is a really good match for the dark random Astra the bricks and cool gray - is good for the bit of storage is going to be holding up the arch when filing with a nail file like this it's really important not to introduce a curve to the butchers and try and keep it perpendicular to the rest of the structure I'm using my fine tip applicator as before and I'm applying PVA glue I'm also spending a lot of time trying to get the edges perfectly lined up to the inner edge of the arch it involves quite a bit of trimming there quite a bit poking with the tweezers but eventually I get there so after the first two pieces are applied we've got something that does approach looking like a butcher's we now need to get this triangle piece on I want this to look like one big block of triangular stone Mike what is on that will bridge itself I've got this little piece out of some of the skill seems dark random ashlar sills the texture it looks a good approximation of the stone that I want hopefully it will slot around the arch and then fold across to make it look like a triangle the first thing to do though is to run around the edges the white edges of the paper with my cool grade two pen and then we'll stick it into place fold it round and see how it looks it can feel quite tedious working with such small pieces of paper and large pens but the ink comes out of these pens so nicely it works really well used a lot of glue here just to give it some moisture and it really helps when smoothing down this kind of work and what we end up with is this this does look like one large block of stone that's exactly what I wanted it looks good I've have to touch up the edges a little bit more with them some extra pen and some of the glue is shining on the brickwork this disappears though once I've added the gloss varnish and then the matte varnish on top when these go together like this it's gonna work really well I think so this is the first one done I think I've got about another seventeen to go this one took 20 minutes so a lot of time ahead of me so I better make a start so after doing 17 of these things almost perfectly the very last one is on the front arch and it's therefore the one that's most visible no no from up the deal I managed to get it on wonky and didn't notice until long after the glue had dried so I scraped it back a little bit and I was considering putting an extra one back on top the problem with this though I thought is if I didn't get it exact you'd see the other one poking out underneath and it would look like a kind of a on top so what I want to try first is just basically scraping off some of the surface of the print and then just using the Windsor Newton Pro markers just dabbing them on in a mottled kind of pattern I want to see what that would look like and what I came out with is this this looks okay it doesn't look too great here on the screen but in real life at a sensible viewing distance it looks good so I'm gonna leave it think once it's vanished it'll look fine so we've got 9 arches all with their buttresses wrapped it's time for the last bit of the puzzle I need to put a covering on the underneath of the beam to make it look like the entire arch is built out of one piece of painted iron to the end I've cut these little strips that are about two millimeters wide but bother measuring them I'm just doing by eye chopping it out of a piece of the green girder texture that the arch itself is made from I'm just gonna basically stick these to the underside of the arch as before to remove the white edge of the paper I need to color it in and this lovely Crayola silly since Penn is the closest match I could find the benefit of this is it smells lovely whilst I'm doing it and to make sure I've got a decent surface onto which to stick my little strip the first thing I'll do is I'll get the trusty nail file out and I'll give it a good filing down to give it a smooth level surface to stick on to it's a right pain trying to get a two millimeter wide strip of paper held whilst wearing a felt it pin across it but you get there in the end the glue got the fine tip applicator again it's just normal PVA and put it on quite thick no I wanted it damp and that way I can slide the piece into place more and I get a nice smooth edges to it once it goes on so there we are it's complete the bit of stone I mocked up is looking fine and now and the green bit on the bottom has blended in really nicely with the rest of the arch I did use a wetted finger just to merge it together with the felt pen and I think it's really worked so this is gonna look great once it's on the layout so there we are a quick test with them all in place it's looking great I love the fact that you can see down these arches like this it's wonderful really pleased with how it's looking so now what we need to do is go and get them looking more like a bridge and get it under the layout so on to the next part Stage five construct the bridge it's time to construct the bridge we've got the nine arches and we've got the template I showed earlier I'm not going to use PVA today I'm going to use super glue the reason being I want to get its stuff as quickly as possible and as straight as possible because this is the underside of the bridge if everything lines up here that I know is going to be correct underneath the track bed so I started gluing the arches in place I took extreme care to get them straight and to get them right up lined up onto the guides that I'd created I took care to press them together as well and to make sure that I was building a solid structure what it didn't take extreme care over though is to make sure that they were actually at 90 degrees to the board itself and I was introducing a never saw slight twist to the bridge it wasn't really obvious until I placed the bridge under the layout and it wasn't a major problem in the end but if I were to do this again I would take more care at this point and perhaps not use super glue then we ended up with this almost exactly as I was intending really happy with it it's nice and flat on the top it's gonna go into the layout really well it really looks good absolutely over the moon so we can press on and get it underneath the way out Stage six position the bridge so as with the rest of the layout have built this bridge a few millimeters shorter than the gap between the best board and the truck bed that just helps me get it into the right place more easily and it helps me get the top of it aligned with the base board correctly on this side of the bridge we've got the added challenge of these wires coming from underneath the first board and going up to the track I've already cut a notch at the bottom of here just to help these ones go through we've got more of a problem towards the top these wires join the track bed right where the top of the butch roses are so I'm going to need to do some surgery to the bridge at this point and I'm afraid to say that surgery isn't pretty it's really difficult to cut a solid card it's been stuck together and with super glue PVA and then vanished but here we are I've made a slot the wires fit in nicely and it works okay these square holes are for the piano wire which is going to control the points up above so I'll show you that now eventually jangles points are going to be controlled from servos beneath the board via 1.5 millimeter piano wire like this I decided that instead of trying to construct the viaduct and situated the rods are hidden I'm just gonna have them on sure they're not gonna be that noticeable and here with the bridge in place I've proven that it works so with that done I've glued the bridge to the underside of the truck bed I'm holding the bridge in place on stacks of card just to keep it pressured up onto the top of the baseboard there's a bigger gap at the front and then as the back that's the result of the twist that I managed to get into the bridge as I was grilling them together it shouldn't be too noticeable once we see it finished stage seven and the finishing touches so now it's time to put the finishing details in place and I'm starting off with this balance just to cover up the gap underneath the Boris's even though it's going to be underneath the river which is going to be here it's going to underneath the waterline I'm putting on a little balance to that end I'm just using a strip of half millimeter card covered in the bricks and cutting it into small places and gluing it at the foot of each Boutrous this is the strip I'm using I'm just doing it by eye just putting it up measuring it with the scalpel and then just chopping you off with the exposed card edges colored in with the brown literacy pearl marker it's impossible to see that it's just an export bit of card underneath there to the naked eye especially it looks fine so they're all done and the bridge is looking good you can't see that it's twisted you can't say that it's out of true it looks absolutely fine the balance has just finished it off nicely everything looks nice and straight and I'm quite pleased with it so we can move on to finishing the bridge off now all that's left is to ballast the track and then put the fences along the top because the bridge is straight under the truck bed is curved there are gaps that need to be filled I use a bully pot and fill these in this is a two-part epoxy substance and it's made of two different parts of it like plasticine you mix them together and then push them into place just like you would with plasticine and it dries rock hard so we're gonna fill those gaps in now starting by putting off two equal parts of the substance and mixing it together so here we are a ball of plasticine types of substance which I'm going to put into the gaps there's quite a few I'm just along here in front of the top of the bridge and then round here into these gaps here the idea is we just don't want any ballast to fall down these halls while we're watching me filling in these Falls it's worth pointing out that I missed a little bit of the bridge build you'll have seen across the top up to this height of the track bed I've put a little bit of green iron girder in place with a little concrete wall behind it and this is just to give the front fish some kind of depth it looks as close as I can get it to the real bridge in Dewsbury which does seem to have some kind of concrete bent behind the front of the arch so I didn't record that bit but you can see it there in place I think that looks about right the holes are filled the ballast is led and is drying and now it's just the fences I bought these brass ones online from a retailer called n brass lockers and it's definitely worth looking at some fabulous things on there these are actually traffic offences but they're the closest I could see to the ones that were on the real bridge at Jewsbury I don't have an airbrush or any aerosols I'll just brush painted these I used some surface primer underneath and then some white paint I'm gonna put on top once that paint is done and dry I'll start putting them on the top of the arch I fixed the first piece of fence dead center in the arch and then I would be 2nd and 3rd pieces upside down by starting in the center I get it so that the edges are equal if there isn't a full piece of fence that fits on I simply use my pin vise to create holes at the right spacing for the fence I kept slotting it in in between each goal to make sure they're in the right place after a test fit just use little tiny drops of super glue just dropped it in to play the superglue grabs it really tight especially if the hole is quite small and it just slots into place and stays put and then with one more hole and a few more drops of glue it's time to add the final piece of fence this bridge has taken five weeks to build and I'm finally here at the end I think it looks fabulous I couldn't be happier with it if you found this video interesting please consider subscribing to the channel channel by clicking the plus 47 logo in the circle just down below the next video should see the completion of the viaduct just three more arches to go we'll see you then thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Chandwell

Views: 6,087

Keywords: N Gauge, Scratch build, Card, Model, Model railway, Model architecture, Model layout, Bridge, Model bridge

Id: 13vViLO1zuY

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020