Skills STATION
This month George Dent provides the ultimate guide to building plastic lineside kits and offers some scratchbuilding tips.
Welcome to the fourth part of Skills Station’s kit-building module. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced modeller looking to hone your skills, our team of experts will split a modelling task or skill into easy to follow, bite-sized chunks, busting myths along the way. Join our Facebook group and you can post your pictures and chat to fellow modellers all learning the same skills. We’ll offer friendly feedback and tips to make you even better!
Injection-moulded plastic kits have many benefits for modellers.
They’re freely available, relatively cheap and require minimal skill to assemble. The moulding process allows plenty of detail relief to be rendered, giving masonry and timber-clad structures a convincing appearance.
Plastic is also lightweight and can be cut or shaped easily, meaning that kits can be adapted to suit your layout. Converting a full structure to a low-relief building is possible, while several similar kits may be combined to create larger structures, such as viaducts or factories.
All manner of structures are available in ‘N’, ‘OO’ and ‘O’. Continental ranges are also worth exploring, particularly for post-war subjects. Indeed, the homogenisation of architectural styles since the 1950s allows some European and American-outline structures to look at home on a UK layout.
In the most part, assembling plastic kits is a straightforward task, following similar processes to those outlined in last month’s Skills Station. Careful study of the instructions and prepara
There’s a vast range of plastic building and lineside kits available for most scales.
tion of the components prior to assembly is key, while accurate alignment of the wall and roof sections is vital.
To demonstrate a broader range of techniques, I decided to showcase the building of a slightly more complex kit, from the Wills Craftsman range. These have been around for decades and are, perhaps, kits in the loosest sense of the word. An ‘aid to scratchbuilding’ is, perhaps, a more accurate description. Consisting of sheets of embossed plastic sheet and various detailing components (including window frames, gutters, doors and chimney pots), full-size paper plans are provided, and the modeller is expected to cut many of the parts to the required shape and size. It might appear onerous work at first, but the kits do provide a great opportunity to hone a different set of skills. Furthermore, they provide ample opportunity for customisation, with plenty of spare materials being available separately.