A bit of a dilemma

[Alan woodard]

Good afternoon one and all.
I,m building a goods shed that had English bond brick work. My idea was to scrib them as in Pendon style, but the shed being as big as it is would see me to my grave. The next option was to use brick card as supplied by Howard scenics but having painted a trial piece found that once painted, the brickwork does'nt stand out very well, In fact it looks horrid. Third option was to use Exactoscale brick architectural paper ( from Burnard Weller days ) but the problem I'm having with it is When being cut and when folding, some of the bricks come off. Is it because it's old stock, or was it a problem when it was new?
Has anyone out there used this paper before and had the same problem? And does anyone have any surgestions for a cure to stop the bricks falling away. Or is there any other manurfacturer of something the same or similar out there ?
Regards to all.

Alan.

[MarkS]

I have used the Exactoscale brick paper, and it works well too...
But like many of our products, there are secrets. In the case of peeling bricks, you need to warm up the paper so that the "bricks" become flexible.
I used a hair dryer IFRC.

[alan woodard]

Hi Mark.
Thanks for that, But do you warm it before cutting and also folding ?
Is the product still available ?

Alan.

[Terry Bendall]

Alan

I am wondering why you have not gone for embossed stryene sheet. There are some issues - the Slater's sheets are sometimes not very square and the bricks on some of the Wills sheets are sometimes not very crisp but in my view both give an acceptable result.

The alternative of course is to laser cut the walls as Tim Horn has been decribing elsewhere on here.

Terry Bendall

[Alan woodard]

Hi terry.
For me it's all down to cost. Funds are tight for me at the moment, plus I'm not that mad on the styrene sheets for the reasons that you mentioned, And another reason for the Exactoscale paper, I'v got a wodge of it sitting in my waiting to be used box. ( for a long time now )
I'v glued a test piece to some mount card/board and test painted it and it looks brilliant. I'd have to say that it's the best looking brick paper/card ect there is if your looking for a brick surface that is without being effected by wind, rain and frost. Allot of the GWR goods sheds, engine sheds, station buildings ect used a hard red/red oxcide ? looking brick of which I'm trying to replicate.
I would love to go down the Laser cut road, but again it's the cost, plus I would'nt know how to go about it.
There's a thread on the forum of a laser cut kit that someone has done for himself and it looks fantastic, I definatly think it's the way to go, but as I said, for me It's the cost at the moment.
cheers.

Alan.

[MarkS]

Hi Alan,

I warmed it up mainly for folding around windows, but it makes sense to do so for cutting too.
My few remaining sheets must be 20 years old now, I have not seen any advertised for many years.
I seem to recall the sheets were made in Australia, though don't quote me on that.

[Alan woodard]

Hi Mark.
I had a trial go and it works much better, so thanks for the tip.
I have quite a few of each colour but most is of the later type that had no sticky back, so has to be guled. Also it's about 15/20 years old and yes it was made in Australia.
I'd love it to be available again.
Regards.

Alan.

[MarkS]

Alan,
there was an article a long time ago about using these sheets, and I found it, turns out the original was in the S4 News...
"Architectural surfaces (Exactoscale)" - Issue 84, Sep 1993 by Graham Rayner

Here is the link.
s4news_download.php?f=S4-84.pdf - go down to page 21...

I agree, it is too bad this product is no longer available.

[Alan woodard]

Thanks Mark.
Will give it a viewing.
I'v got a feeling there was an artical in MRJ, or one of the other model press mag's.
Cheers.

Alan.

[Alan woodard]

Thanks Mark.
Will give it a viewing.
I'v got a feeling there was an artical in MRJ, or one of the other model press mag's.
Cheers.

Alan.

[billbedford]

Goes outside
Stares at the house wall for minutes
Mortar definitely flush with bricks (except where needing repointing)
Appears that much effort is going into another modelling inexactitude…………….

[martin goodall]

Goes outside
Stares at the house wall for minutes
Mortar definitely flush with bricks (except where needing repointing)
Appears that much effort is going into another modelling inexactitude…………….

Bill raises an interesting point. He is absolutely right, and it is something I have noticed myself. Except in very old and decrepit brickwork in ancient walls, brick walls are pretty well flush, with hardly any noticeable relief at all, and certainly none that would be visible in 4mm scale. So, in theory, plain printed brick paper ought to fill the bill.

And yet, the 'flat' appearance of brickpaper somehow doesn't look 'right'. I have seen it suggested (and I agree with this) that for purely artistic reasons, it is advisable to put more relief into models than is strictly correct in dimensional terms. Hence the widespread use of embossed or moulded brickwork in various media, particularly card and styrene sheet.

There is no 'right' answer to this conundrum. It is a question of what looks right for you. I use the Wills scenic sheets for brickwork, which produce more relief perhaps than any other product, and this is arguably exaggerated, and yet I like the look of it. The bricks are also over-scale, but I still prefer this product as a means of representing brickwork. It is an entirely personal choice, and I appreciate that others may find it unacceptable. As the French say - “Chacun à son gôut”.

[essdee]

Martin, Bill,

A pet theme of mine, and another case of horses for courses. Although brickpaper has a 'correct' flushness (?) of mortar and brick -for modern/well-maintained situations at least - I suspect that it fails to work for us partly because light reflects equally from the brick and the mortar representations, when seen at an angle; it immediately shouts 'paper!'. In reality, hard bricks would reflect some light whereas the generally rougher mortar would not, in dry conditions, a difficult feature to replicate.

Another factor, affecting reflectivity and also the degree of relief, is the hardness of the mortar. Our railway infrastructure will generally employ engineering or otherwise hard-faced mass-produced bricks, secured with hard Portland cement which can almost match the smoothness of the brick. In fact, that smooth surface is misleading; if you look closely you will see that the brickie, if properly trained, has angled the mortar to leave an undercut below the upper course, and a slight overlap to the lower course, all to hinder water-retention in the mortar course.

On older, more vernacular buildings, soft lime mortar will often weather very deeply where exposed to driving rain (Pendon will have allowed for this on their south-western aspects -won't they....?). The softer nature of many old bricks also allows them to loose their sharp outlines. So, that moulded sheet brick, which can never capture the look of eg. a GCR blue-brick bridge abutment, has greater potential for earlier vernacular buildings or walls.

The sharply-defined laser-cut brickwork, which excels in the sharp outlines of hard factory brickwork, may benefit from some customising with mortar infills perhaps? Plenty of scope for experimentation there; but first go and have a look as Bill has done. I will be trying this when I get back to building things other than wheeled items....

Best wishes

Steve

[Alan woodard]

Bill.
I had already gone outside and looked for a while at the brickwook and had thought the same thing. I had also taken plenty of photos of the GWR station near to where I live and found the same. The reason I had chosen the old exacto architectural paper was that I had enough ( just ) to complete the model, plus, the joy of said paper has a very slighty deeper cement coarse than the bricks making it look not quite flat but very close to flat and thus making it easier to paint each brick that much easier, and as Steve has pointed out flat paper just does'nt look right ( to me anyway ).
There are quite a few victorian and edwardian buildings around that did have fairlly deep cement coarse's and I wonder if this is for the same reason that Steve has pointed out regarding helping to stop water penetration.

[Jan]

Bricks & Bonds. Fascinating stuff. There's mortar the subject than you think...

Modern Buildings, Their Planning, Construction And Equipment Vol1, G. A. T. Middleton, The Caxton Publishing Company, 1921

English bond is undoubtedly the strongest, as it almost entirely avoids continuous vertical joints (see Fig. 83, where the blackened joints are continuous), and this fact alone should commend it to general use; yet many object to its use on the ground that the numerous transverse joints permit the penetration of damp, and that its appearance is not as good as that of brickwork bonded in Flemish bond. These are false objections, however, as there is no more likelihood of damp penetrating a wall in English bond than any other bond, provided the bricks are thoroughly flushed up with mortar.

(My highlighting)

Read more: http://chestofbooks.com/architecture/Mo ... uction-V1/

[martin goodall]

I confess to being much more interested in brick bonds than in locomotive valve gear! Partly this is due to my having got up close and personal with a few buildings over the years. Actually seeing how a building is put together, including climbing on the roof (yes, with scaffolding and safety boards, etc. in case you were wondering) gives a very useful insight for modelling purposes.

Older brick walls can exhibit the most amazing variety of bonding which entirely defies any attempt to label it as 'Flemish', 'English' or whatever. Railway buildings and other industrial buildings (most often built in 'English' bond) usually exhibit reasonably tidy brickwork, but vernacular buildings are another matter entirely. Those with pretentions to represent 'polite' architecture usually show a reasonably regular Flemish bond, but more workaday buildings could be very random in their bonding - quite a challenge for the modeller, in fact.

Don't get me going about Portland cement - old walls (both brick and stone, and especially the latter) should always be re-pointed with lime mortar. Otherwise you will draw water into the wall and it will get trapped there, with disastrous results.

Building textbooks are useful up to a point, but should not be followed slavishly. It was a bit like the Railway Rule book - compliance could be somewhat approximate at times, and all sorts of bad practice went on. I am a firm believer in modelling it as it really was, and not as it should have been.

Which doesn't really help in reaching a conclusion on the dilemma that was originally posed in this thread. I wouldn't disagree with any of the views that have been expressed - it really does come down to a question of personal choice and judgment.

[BorderCounties]

I, too, seem to have spent quite a bit of time peering closely at bricks. My current problem, which I'm now fairly confident I've resolved, has involved scaling an engine shed which still exists but has seen extensive additions of a farming nature. The two published measurements of the length of the shed, 156' and 165', obviously don't help. From the one accurate measurement I've got - big tape measure with half a dozen cows looking on - I've finally put some drawings together - my calculated measurement is only 10" over 156'.

So, having measured and counted brick courses etc, the question was what to use for the model. I bought some Flemish bond brick paper and various plastic card mouldings to compare and play around with, but the first thing which jumped out was that the bricks are too small (by about 10%). The moulded plasticard bricks also appears far too rounded across the face of the brick to the point where the headers looked more like a bubble than a brick end. Unlike the engine shed, the waiting room block is still accessible on all sides and having taken numerous digital photos, I starting playing around with the images in Photoshop, getting rid of electrical conduits, small branches etc by cloning bricks and colour matching other bits. Then the penny dropped - when I reduced it to 4mm scale and viewed the screen from a normal (modelling) viewing distance, all the changes disappeared. Printing this out (in draft form at the moment) also revealed that because the building is relatively small and there are some 3D elements such as window cills and frame, the brickwork does not immediately shout "paper". This also has the added bonus of matching the prototype brick colours.

Back to the engine shed - the Photoshop approach doesn't work here as there have been additions and repairs to the original structure and it is no longer possible to photograph all the necessary details. Laser cutting did come to mind and may still be useful for some parts, particularly a course of bricks set a 45 degrees to the walls. Having followed Robin Whittle's Barrow Road blog over on the "other" side, it seems that the laser cut brickwork is possibly too perfect for 140 year old bricks and the cuts themselves should be filled with mortar. Getting an acceptable representation of varying brick colours would, I felt, also be a challenge. I then came across Paperbrick (at http://www.paperbrick.co.uk) which has some brick sets which matched almost exactly my prototype. Choosing brick type, bond, size, mortar colour etc allows a PDF to be create which you can save and print. Fidelity to the on-screen colours can only be attained by using a good quality photographic paper. Draft printing on "ordinary" copy paper gives the whole sheet an orange tint. A full A4 sheet does look like paper even on a matt surface, but the upside is that the colours and brick courses are correct. Has anyone else used this?

My current thinking is to use a hybrid system of either an MDF or plywood base for the structure; sandwich laser cut window frames and glazing bars; the outer walls, which are divided into panels, covered in the Paperbrick generated brickwork; and the piers between (and above) the panels, laser cut 1.5mm Rowmark. Whether or not I have the shell laser cut will depend on a trial run using plywood. The "flatness" of the printed brickwork is limited to 42mm x 48mm panels into which are inserted fairly large windows so, with the laser cut piers between the panels giving a layer of relief, it should look 3D from normal viewing distance. The end gables have doors, ventilators, etc which again minimises the flatness of the paper.

I may be gone some time . . .

John G

[Terry Bendall]

In MRJ 204 from 2011, Barry Luck describes how to make computer generated brickwork. This method has been used on Brighton Road and has given acceptable results.

Terry Bendall

[jon price]

Juweela make scale individual ceramic bricks in all kinds of brick colours and in packs from 500 to 5000 .http://www.bnamodelworld.com/juweela/juw-27032

They are 1/72 but the difference at the size of an individual brick is marginal (about 1/10" scale difference in length) I suspect that for pre mechanisation brickwork they might well do. I havn't used them, but I have built a stone building with stones and it goes together surprisingly quickly.

Jon Price

[billbedford]

Sorry, these are not accurate enough for P4 -- they are all missing their frog………..

[Alan woodard]

Even if they where exact, I'd like to build it in this life time, not the next.

Al.

[Will L]

Remember Formcraft. Moulded plastic 4mm bricks. I tired this in the 80@s I have one small building (a plate layer hut) to prove it. It was making this building that enlightened me on the non existence of scale time, I could have build the real hut in about the same time it took to build the model.

Will

[grovenor-2685]

Sorry, these are not accurate enough for P4 -- they are all missing their frog………..

OK for B&Q bricks then.
Keith

[Andy W]

I passed this wall the other day and thought of this thread:

[David B]

Juweela make scale individual ceramic bricks in all kinds of brick colours

What does one use for mortar? Are we back to the PVA thread (elsewhere on this forum) or do we need a scale mixer?