Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Another building for Stafford Mills

The church in the approximate location on top of the hillside. I'll add a small fenced grave yard alongside the church when the building is installed in place. 

I've just about completed another building, in this case a small wood frame church, for Stafford Mills. This is the classic Campbell Scale Models Community Church. 

I don't know when this kit was introduced but I remember seeing it when I was a kid on layouts and in advertisements. I picked this up for a song at a Timonium show a few years ago. Frankly, it remains one of the few church kits on the market. It's really too small to a be represent a small town New England church, but it certainly looks like a church. I shingled the overhang above the door  but as you can see from the photos I haven't installed it yet. I'm thinking leaving it off may help it look a little more like some of the New England churches I'm using for inspiration.

I built it pretty much according to the instructions - even using the stained glass windows which are essentially images of stained glass on 35mm film strips. I've built a number of these kits over the years (this is the first time I built the church) and found the text in the instructions is somewhat lacking. I tend to read through the steps once or twice to get a feel for the approximate order and then use the exploded diagram(s) to actually get the pieces in the right place! 

I found the wood shingles in the kit were kind of stuck together. I've also tried to use the Campbell shingles in the past and found they were almost impossible to straighten and get to lay flat so I pitched them and substituted Northeastern Scale Models pre made shingled roofs instead. 

For the steeple sections I used BEST shingles leftover from the Inn project a few weeks ago since the coloration of the BEST shingles was close to the Northeastern roofs - beside, the BEST shingles were piled up in the corner of my cutting mat!

The roof does need just a little bit of weathering to tone it down a bit. 

I think there's room for one more structure along this street in Stafford Mills, then I can proceed with planting the buildings, finishing the road surface, and getting the scenic textures in place. 


1 comment:

Richard said...

Looks exactly like the churches that are scattered throughout small towns here in New England