As we’re now dangerously near Christmas I’ve been spending all my modeling time finishing the Linka Dublo terraced houses for my father in law’s present. I’ve just finished varnishing and assembling them tonight, so here’s all three in a row!

For some variety I’ve painted the doors different colours and glued different ‘drapes’ into the windows. The drapes are fashioned from various bits of coloured paper, while the window panes are cut from a 1mm thick piece of transparent lamination sheet supplied by my lovely wife. I was going to sacrifice an OHP transparency for the windows, but the thicker laminating plastic turned out to be a lot easier to work with, plus the extra thickness means it does quite a convincing job of looking like plate glass.

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Now that I’ve got around to doing some basic assembly using a new glue: Liquid Nails, this post continues from the previous Cathedral post.

There are various varieties of Liquid Nails, many of which aren’t water based. I chose the water based version because it’s easy to clean up plus I can use a wet brush to smooth away any extra glue squeezed out between Hirst Art blocks. This ‘fast’ Liquid Nails starts to skin and cure in about 20 minutes but that’s not a problem as I simply squeeze out small amounts onto a scrap palette (aka pet food container lid) and apply it with a brush to the Hirst Arts blocks.

It dries to a creme colour and looking at the photos it’s fairly obvious where I’ve been using it. However the whole building is going to be painted once assembled so discolouring the bricks like this isn’t an issue. Once dry it provides a very firm yet slightly flexible bond between the bricks which is just great. I found the PVA I was using wouldn’t always provide a good bond and even when it did the bond was quite brittle, so flexing the larger sections would tend to snap pieces off. You can seperate pieces glued together with Liquid Nails - which is a plus if you’ve misaligned a couple of blocks, but it certainly requires a lot more effort than the PVA glued pieces.

Regarding assembling the Cathedral itself I have to say it’s very slow going. There seem to be a million blocks involved in the building so it’s an exercise in patience gluing them together. I’m currently trying to build up the thirteen sub-pieces that go together to build the smaller removable side gallery of the Cathedral! In the photos you can see the two long interior and exterior gallery walls and various parts of the bell-tower that makes up the front of the gallery.

I’ve always been impressed by Mr Hirst’s fine molds however I have to say while building the Cathedral it’s increasingly obvious there’s some problematic pieces on the molds involved. In particular the small gothic arch pieces that make up most of the windows in the Cathedral don’t go together well. Maybe it’s because there’s definite left and right arch pieces (they certainly aren’t marked as such) but the archways always seem to be slightly too wide for their designated space in the wall, plus they don’t form a square unit when glued together. So a reasonable amount of sanding is involved with assembling each of those small gothic windows.

I’m also wondering how well the sub-parts are going to fit together to form the gallery. I suspect more sanding will be involved in getting the pieces level and well bonded to each other. Ah well, stay tuned!

I’ve made some progress on this year’s Xmas gift for my father in law. As you can see from the photo, I’ve got the basic structures built for the three houses I plan to make for his model railway table.

There’s a little detailing left to do but nothing major. In particular I need to use an old tooth brush to scrub wet DAS hobby clay over the gaps between the cast Linka mold pieces that make up the brick walls on the last house. The second house needs a chimney applied and then I can finish painting that too. I’ve completed basic painting on the first house and all it needs is a good coat of Moana matt varnish, followed by some Tamiya high gloss brush on varnish being applied to the window frames and front door.

Linka molds certainly produce some impressive results for fairly minimal effort. They’re also very easy to paint with some careful dry-brushing to cover the brick texture. Individual bricks have then been repainted a range of different colours to break up the monotonous walls.

To complete all three houses I intend to glue cut OHP plastic behind the windows to represent glass and also glue in some simple paper drapes. Once I’ve done that I can finish assembling the houses as they’re constructed from two separate storeys at the moment.

As a final touch I also plan to scratch build some gutters and downpipes, probably from plastic card and half-rods I have kicking around in my garage - assuming I can find them. Having painted one and a half houses this week I’m also quietly confident I can meet my 25th December deadline!