Interiors for industry
Industrial buildings offer myriad opportunities for interesting interiors. Cliff Thomas describes how he created one for his ‘009’ scale slate quarry layout.
Industrial buildings offer myriad opportunities for interesting interiors. Cliff Thomas describes how he created one for his ‘009’ scale slate quarry layout.
In the early years of slate quarrying, the extracted blocks were reduced in size manually, then crafted into roofing slates by men working in small open-sided shelters, known as ‘Gwalia’. These skilled men used a splitting chisel to produce slates to the required thickness, then trimmed them to size with a dressing knife. Mechanisation made only a partial impact on the slate trade. Circular saws could cut blocks and slabs to size and mechanical dressing machines would trim them. This equipment, driven by belts and overhead line shafts, was housed in new mill buildings, replacing the old Gwalia arrangements. The mills became slate factories. That said, no workable means of splitting blocks to the necessary thickness for roofing slates was ever found. Hence, men wielding mallets and chisels continued to sit astride dressing blocks, producing slates which were trimmed to size by dressing machines. Slate mills in North Wales, especially around the major slate-producing areas of Blaenau Ffestiniog, Llanberis (Dinorwic quarries) and Bethesda (Penrhyn quarry) were huge, containing dozens of saw tables. Dinorwic’s Australia Level dressing shed contained at least 34 saw tables and, even in 4mm:1ft scale, would have been 4ft 2in long and over 1ft wide! I did not have anything like the space available to replicate such a mill on my work-in-progress ‘OO9’ layout (MR216). However, I wanted to capture the general spirit of these buildings and their machines in a more modest size. Smaller, less famous and more remote North Wales quarry operations might seem to be more promising subjects, but take Conglog quarry, near Tanygrisiau, for example. Its mill building, at some 140ft by 40ft, with a 30ft diameter waterwheel, was still on the large side. The structure I eventually settled on draws on features of various buildings. I didn’t include a waterwheel, suggesting either a new Pelton wheel or electric power) but I did include the mounting blocks and a leat (a trench or ditch that conveys water to a mill wheel). My mill was made from foamboard clad with embossed plastic sheet. The roof is a lattice work of obeche and beech timber with a York Model Rail slate roof. It looked good on the outside, but I wanted the same standard on the inside.
THE INTERIOR
Slate mills generally used internal railways to aid production. Some internal tracks ran the length of the building, others crosswise. They were always hand-worked. I glued three lengths of Peco ‘OO9’ track across the building and assembled layers of card to form a floor that’s almost flush with the rail surfaces. This left a minimal railhead, painted in rust colours, above the floor surface. Setting the height of the line shaft arrangement is crucial. It has to be as high as possible within the building above the tables, but not foul the roof cross beams and trusses. Although I did not intend to fit drive belts, I wanted to give myself the option of fitting them at a later date. I made the wall brackets out of the display stands you get with Airfix plastic ship kits and strips of plastic card. The bearings are pieces of square plastic tube with part of the top cut away – just enough to slide the main shaft (brass rod) into position. Small bearings of brass tube to slide onto the rod (shaft) could then be pushed into position when the shaft was dropped into place in the bracket assemblies. The drive wheels came from an old Airfix ‘Austerity’ 0‑6‑0ST with the flanges filed off. Having worked out where the saw tables and planer would go, the wheels were positioned in alignment with the machines. The tricky bit was how to interpret what would have been the means of transferring the rotation of the external waterwheel into the rotation of the line shaft. Quite simply, I have no idea how this would have originally been achieved in such a mill. When in such a position, I always work on the principle that ‘if it looks right, it probably is right’. Perhaps ‘may be right’ is better in this instance – doubtless someone will look at the angled mounting of bevel gears (from Expo Tools) in horror and explain how it should have been done! With the interior and exterior walls painted, the entire line shaft structure, including wall brackets, was prepared off the model, painted, then fixed in position with Devcon two‑part epoxy.
THE MACHINES
My mill has three large saw tables, a smaller table, a planer and four dressing machines. It also contains a traditional dressing block and a simple bench seat. There were numerous types and sizes of saw benches (or saw tables). All shared the basic principle of a circular saw roughly in the centre of the machine with a sliding table mounted on rollers guided by runners. The slate block was secured to the table which, on being moved forward, pushed the block through the saw blade. Sawtooth wear was high and huge volumes of dust were produced, to the detriment of the workforce. Over time, water sprays and effective dust extraction were introduced. Dressing machines started as a form of manually operated guillotine, but true mechanisation arrived with the development of a large rotating affair, akin to a huge lawnmower blade, but with just two blades mounted at an angle to the centreline. The slate to be trimmed was held against the arm (marked for various sizes) mounted at right-angles to the ‘drum’ with the end to be cut held over a fixed blade, the trim occurring as the rotating blade sliced down and through the slate. Planers produced a flat, even surface across large blocks, used for items such as snooker/billiard tables, switchboard panels and headstones. Like saw benches, the block was pegged to a table which moved back and forth. Over this was a gantry affair to control the side-to-side movement and depth of cut made by the blade as the block was moved. I started with the idea of them being interpretive rather than accurate, but found myself fascinated with establishing exactly how they were worked and operated, and found myself adding more and more detail to the mechanisms. In short, it got a bit out of hand! The dimensions for the saw table were taken from preserved examples at the National Slate Museum at Gilfach Ddu. The planer is not dimensionally a true scale model, being something of a midsize combination of a small planer at Gilfach Ddu and a large machine still in use at Inigo Jones Slate Works near Caernarfon. The basic dressing machine is based on one at Gilfach Ddu, but adjusted to
produce an earlier version. To produce the ‘modern’ dressing machines I used the dimensions of the rotating element of the earlier versions, but otherwise worked out their construction from photographs. Materials used in the basic construction of all the machines is plastic card, tube and rod. Initially, I thought the saw blades could be actual blades, as used in mini-drills, but I could not find such saws in a small enough diameter, so I made them by cutting circles of plastic card with ‘teeth’ carefully filed into the disk with a triangular needle file. The rotating blades of the dressing machines (and they do rotate, even though they do not need to) were made from a length of plastic tube with sections cut away to leave just the two ‘blades’, with a strip of thin plastic card added to produce the actual cutting blade. The large wheels on the older dressing machines came from my bits box. Even the control wheels were made from small sections of plastic tube, with holes drilled through at 90º for the spokes, which I made out of plastic rod and mounted on a smalldiameter tube in the centre. The tiny assembly was then sanded to a suitable width. The only things I didn’t scratchbuild were the large pulley wheels. They’re old ‘TT’ and ‘OO’ gauge wheels with the flanges removed. The machines were initially painted a very dark grey and then dry-brushed with Railmatch Oily Steel, finished off with very selective dry-brushed Railmatch Dark Rust. When completely dry, real slate dust was rubbed over with a cotton bud. The finishing touches were small pieces of real slate. I cut these to size using a junior hacksaw. It works but it ruins the blade. You can glue the slate pieces with epoxy.
DETAILING THE INTERIOR
The most interesting bit! I brushed diluted Resin W white glue over the floor areas and lightly sprinkled on Woodland Scenics fine grey ballast. With dabs of neat Resin W applied to the feet, each machine was positioned to ensure the feet were on the floor, rather than the ballast. I complemented the blocks of slate glued to the machines with other slabs, some cut and ready for shipping, others ready to be cut. Finally, crushed real slate was spread around using a coffee stirrer, concentrating on areas around machines. When I was happy with the arrangement, I fixed it in position using the time-honoured method we’d use for applying track ballast – water-diluted Resin W (with a drop of green washing-up liquid) was applied over and around the slate with an eyedropper. It may sound unlikely, but it works; the white glue becomes transparent when it dries and it holds the slate in place. Above: The three dressing machines in place. To the lower right is a dressing block and a bench seat. This detail was a bit of an afterthought – in the future I might adapt a figure to sit astride the block. Outside the wall to the left is the bulky slate structure which would have once supported the other end of the waterwheel shaft. The pit beneath correlates to an appropriate hole in the baseboard where the model is located.