HOn3 Barlow Pass Layout | Narrow Gauge Water Tank

[Music] Howdy folks. Dave here at Thunder Mesa Studio where I have returned from my long summer hiatus and I am ready to jump back into all of the model railroading projects we've got going on around here. And up near the top of my list of projects is the H3 Barlo pass layout. made a pretty good start on that earlier in the summer. And of course, if you caught the opening of this video, it should come as no surprise that that's what we're going to be working on today. Now, in the last installment, I finished building the benchwork and installing the plywood subroaded with all of the grades and the elevation changes that the plan called for. The next logical step would be to put in the actual roaded, maybe with some some cork, and then start laying the HO3 track. But unfortunately, I'm still waiting for some supplies to arrive. So, I'm not quite ready to go to that next step yet. Instead, I think in order to keep moving forward, what we're going to do is uh skip ahead and I'm going to start working on some structures for the layout. In my experience, structures take longer than just about anything else on a model railroad, so it's never a bad idea to uh get a head start on those. Now, down in the shelves underneath the layout, I've been storing all of the rolling stock and parts and little kits that I'm going to need to build the layout that I've been collecting for for quite a while. And uh I think I see just the one that I want to start with. Many of you who model in H3 might recognize this particular kit. This is the very popular Durango Press H3 water tank. It's based on a Denver and Rio Grand Western prototype and uh it's just exactly what I need for my little town of Barlo Pass. So, let's open this up and see what's inside. I built a lot of water tanks, but I've never built this particular water tank before. So, curious to see, you know, how the how the manufacturer solved the specific problems of this structure. water tanks are are kind of top, you know, uh they're round and they've got conicle roofs and they've got this uh complicated uh base underneath this trestle-like base. So, you know, every man manufacturer has a little bit of different way of solving those problems. Well, it says here that they use the original uh Denver and Rivrand Western blueprints to design this kit. That's always a great place to start. Those plans were drawn in 1900 at the Denver shops. This is cool. They've already built the basic tank for you. This is the hard part. They did all the hard part, which is the tank itself. What else we got in here? Got some uh pre-cut basswood and some white metal castings for the footings and the spout and the other hardware. Uh, got some tank band fasteners, nutbolt and washer castings. All of these are styrene pieces. Looks like some brass wire. And some cardboard for the roof. Tissue paper for tar paper if you want to do tar paper roofing. This looks like laser cut pieces for the frost box. The instructions wisely suggest that we uh stain all the wood before assembly. Got some 70% isopropyl alcohol here. And then I'm going to mix in a little bit of this leftover shoe dye that I dumped out of the bottle here when I first got it. So, this is the classic shoe dye and alcohol mixture. It's going to give us a nice silvery gray. There we go. Perfect. Now, I just put down a pad of paper towels. Get started staining this stuff. I've taped this down because it's summertime here in Arizona and all the fans are on. That's just to keep it from blowing away. Use my razor saw to add a little bit of wood grain texture. This is a fine tooth razor saw. Most of this wood is going to be painted. also. But if I want to model it with uh you know the paint cracking or peeling off in any way, then I want this uh stained wood to show through. Separate these out into their different sizes. Also, that'll make it a lot easier when it comes time start putting stuff together. Got some interesting quarter round mil pieces here, too. be fascinated to see what those are for later on. Now, one downside of having something preassembled like this is that I don't know what they used to put it together. Um, I'm going to assume it was a PVA like, you know, carpenters glue or or Elmer's glue. And I'm going to assume that it's water soluble. So, uh, I would really hate for this thing to come apart while I'm staining it. Going to try something different on this. Use one of my Minwax stain markers. This color is called classic gray. Always go with the grain, no matter what kind of uh stain you're using. Interesting thing you'll notice about this tank, and this is very prototypical, is that it's not perfectly cylindrical. actually tapers a little bit up towards the top, which uh real tanks actually do, real wooden tanks, but it's not something you often see modeled on a model railroad because it's really hard to do. Really hard to do well. So, I appreciate them uh building that in. While that stain dries, I want to skip ahead in the directions a little bit and assemble the uh the roof. I want to get all these different sub assemblies done so that I can get some paint on everything so everything will be ready to assemble. So, first thing it says is to take these little decorative trim pieces. I've I've already solved the mystery of what these quarter round pieces are. And each one needs to be cut to match the angle. That's what we're supposed to be doing right there. Now, this isn't in the instructions, but I need to figure out the angle on those cuts. So, I'm going to take the top side of this piece and I'm going to connect up all the corners of the octagon with lines. That should give me a better idea of the angles I need to cut on each one of these pieces. Now I just need to continue that line through this piece. And then that's my angle. Right. Right. It's like holy compound angle Batman. Further complicate things. This needs to be glued more or less in the middle of the piece. Got a little block here I use to u line this up. Using some yellow carpenters glue, my favorite for this kind of thing. All right. And now the next piece should go just like that. All right. Last piece. Moment of truth. Sure everything matches up. Ah, look at that. Like a glove. Well, after a little sanding and touch up with the stain, I'm pretty happy with that. Now, the roof is laser cut and etched. I went back over all of the etch lines with my hobby knife to cut them a little bit deeper so I could fold this to shape. I just need to uh glue these edges together. A little white glue. Hold that for a minute or two. The instructions tell you to go back and put a piece of tape over this joint. And I really don't like to use tape because the uh adhesive is u well it's got a lot of acids in it. that's going to eat into this cardboard and it's not archival and it's going to it's going to fail over time. So, I'll show you what I do instead. Just got a piece of bond paper here from the printer. Cut a little slip and I'm just going to glue that with white glue over that joint. And this is going to make a much stronger joint than tape would. And it's going to last a heck of a lot longer. And now we glue this on top of this. The side with the etched circle, by the way, goes on the bottom. So you can line it up with the tank later on. Just need to line this up with the octagon. Easier to do that from the bottom. All right. You can see from the top view, the tank is not perfectly round. So, I'm going to do something a little extra here. I'm going to cut a little circle of foam core. And I need one that's about three and 116th in diameter. Good sharp knife helps. And this should make the whole thing a little bit stronger, not to mention rounder. That should do a much better job of matching that circle. Starting to look like a tank. Now I want to prep all of these little goodies for painting. Now I'm just filing off the mold part lines from this white metal spout. Part of that prep is using a a number 70 drill bit. Make sure the holes are open on the spout and the pulleys for the spout rigging which we'll be adding later on. Now I'll give everything a coat of this Rustoleum dark brown camo. I realized that while I'm painting stuff, I should probably also paint the tank bands. Those are just a printed paper that's provided in the kit, and they need to be cut out. And the reason I want to paint them is for the same reason that I want to stain all the wood. And that's if uh you know I want to show the paint cracking or peeling away anywhere. I want rusty metal bands to show through, not white paper ones. It's kind of a tricky operation cutting these out. You want to make sure you have a very sharp blade in your hobby knife. Brand new blade. And um I've taped everything down so it doesn't move around. Going to just do the horizontal cuts. Then I'm going to uh you know basically color the bands and leave them on the backing sheet until I'm ready to use them. And then I can cut them out on the ends and they'll be ready to go. And that way they won't get, you know, crumpled or lost or destroyed. Now rather than take these back and paint them, I'm just going to use a brown Sharpie. Pretty much the same result. Okay, got that done without uh breaking or mangling any of them. So now just set all this aside out of harm's way until I'm ready to install them on the tank. The next step is to build the legs. And the instructions come with some u pre-drawn templates. I'm going to take those and turn them into construction jigs, which should make this go a lot faster. Right now, I'm going to spray this with some uh spray adhesive and put it on some foam core. I'm going to take a piece of scrap. This looks like a a 6 by12 in ocale, but that's not important because I'm just going to use it as a stop here when I glue these pieces in. So, they will be um they all be the same height. You won't have any Caddyy Wampus legs. Then I take some clear packaging tape, put it over the top of the drawing so that when we glue the pieces in, they won't stick to the paper. They'll just stick to each other. So, the instructions are telling me to build four uprightes with the A template and one with the B template. And I'm going to be using these 12 by 12 pieces. I assume these are 12 x 12. Yeah, looks like it to me. Uh really handy thing to have is a scale ruler like this one from uh CTT Incorporated. This is a 187th scale ruler for HO scale because all of the scale lumber in the kit is called out in scale dimensions. So, this is a this is a 12 by 12 by 11. And I need to cut all of these down to 10 feet in length. Fortunately, I have this little miter box, one of my favorite tools here in the studio, and this little razor saw, which you saw me using earlier. And you can get both of these from MicroArk. And uh this comes with a little stop right here. So, I've set this up so that each one of these will be scale 10 ft long when I cut it. So I can make multiples of these that are all going to be the same length of I use straight pins to hold these in position. Go right down into the foam core. Lining it up with the uh drawing as carefully as I can. I've got one of these uh these 4x8s, little yellow glue on each end. And we'll put those diagonal braces on. Dab of glue in the middle here, too, just for good measure. Okay, I've got all the legs done now. And I went ahead and made a start on the frost box, too, and added some extra bracing on the inside um with some wood from my scrap pile over there. Uh because it's pretty flimsy on its own. And looking at the drawings here, it's uh pretty integral to how this whole thing goes together. So, this seemed like a good place to start. Kind of a solid anchor for the whole thing. But before I assemble it, I need to drill some holes for some truss rods. Using the drawing as a guide, I'm marking where these holes need to be. But I did a little experiment, and the instructions call for you to use a number 78 uh drill bit, which is really, really, really tiny, teeny tiny, microscopic. In fact, it's it's it's too small uh for these uh these pieces of brass wire. So, I switched it up to a 72, which seems to work a little bit better. So, even though you're drilling all the way through the timbers, you want your pieces of wire to be a little short. You want them to be to go about halfway like that. And that way you can put nutbolt washer castings in the end and cap it off. It's little details like this that really make a model like this come to life. Okay, got the last of the truss rods installed, at least on these uh these pieces. There'll be more when I put the whole thing together. And um I think we're ready to do that next. To be honest, the instructions are a little bit light on advice for how to put all of this together. So, um, I think the most logical thing is to build it around the frost box, which I've already built and reinforced with some illustration board and and some scraps of of lumber. So, that's what we're going to do. I'm going to try to basically, you know, start with the frost box and build it out from there. I will start by gluing the back wall of the frost box to these uprightes. and another set of legs on the other side. And then glue the rest of the frost box to that. Now I'm going to use this finished assembly to create a little template by tracing around these footings or the bottom of these uh posts I should say. And then I can mirror that and do it on the other side. And that's going to tell me where the rest of the legs should go in relation to these. This is something I kind of wish the kit had come with, but you know, we can improvise. And now we have a useful diagram of where the bottom of all those posts are going to line up. Now, put a little double stick tape on that. Now I can line up the rest of these uprightes and put the connecting cross braces in. Okay, so far so good. For this part, I found it expedient to use some thick CA rather than carpenters glue. Of course, you all know the uh Murphy's law as it applies to syinoacrylate glue, right? It never sticks the first time unless it's in the wrong place. These interior braces are by far the most fun. And by the most fun, I mean not that fun. Okay, last one. Now I can put in the remaining truss rods. Really glad I drilled all these holes before putting this together. And finally to cap off each one of these truss rods with a nearly microscopic nutbolt washer casting. Each one goes in one of these holes with a little dab of CA on the end. I got to make sure the end of the hole is open. So, this takes a while. I think uh I'm going to do this. And uh for the video, we're just going to skip ahead. Well, I'm happy to have that sub assembly all done. I'll admit it's not the squarest thing I've ever built, but um you know, if you've seen any of these tanks out in the wild, uh after a few decades in the outdoors in the elements, they're not all that square either. I've also been testing some paint colors. I think I've got some pretty good matches here for uh the Rio Grand colors. This is some u Vallejo leather brown down here and some Vallejo buff up above it. First, I'm going to hit this with the uh Rustoleum dark brown camo. Then after that, I'll go over it with uh that Vallejo saddle brown. This just makes it a lot easier to paint all of these interior parts. Once again, I've used uh one of the full-size drawings from the plans to make an assembly jig. uh gluing it to some foam core and then covering it with some clear packaging tape. And now I want to take some double-sided tape, put that over this because I have to cut and assemble a whole bunch of compound angles here once again for the subbase. This is the part that goes on top of the uh the stand we just built. And then I can mark and cut all of these angles. Heat. [Music] Heat. N. While we wait, I can go ahead and paint this with that Vallejo leather brown. Bend it with a just a little bit of matte medium. Make it flow a little better. And I like to something like this. I like to apply with a with a flat brush. Now, while that paint is still a little tacky, go around with my hobby knife and scrape a little bit of it off. Just using the flat edge of the blade along with the grain of the wood. This is going to allow some of that stain that we put on earlier to show through and give it a nice weathered look. Now I've got a drawing here of the floor timbers. Put a couple of pieces of double stick tape on that. Then I can take this piece that we just made on top right on top of the drawing. And then I can cut all these floor timbers to size and glue them right on top of that. There we go. Have to admit, there's always something very satisfying about taking a pile of sticks and turning it into something like this. Uh, now get some paint on this and we'll glue it to the top of this. Now I can put these two sub assemblies together. Glue on the tops of all of those posts. And I can put this on the top of that. We'll wait on that until the glue dries. Now I can flip this over and glue all of the concrete footings into place. Now you might remember these were white metal castings and I painted them to look like concrete. The plan here is to just put a dab of glue on the bottom of each one of these legs. Now that glue has started to set up, it's still a little tacky, but it hasn't completely dried yet. Turn it upside. Turn it right side up. The kit also comes with a handy template for positioning the tank bands, which is what I want to do next. I've cut it out and put a piece of uh double stick tape on the back so I can just lay it here on the tank. Use a pencil to mark where each one of those bands goes. Pull that off. Turn the whole thing about a quarter turn and do it again. Now, that's going to make it a lot easier to line up those bands. Make sure they're parallel to each other, not wiggling all over the place. I'm going start with the top band and work my way down. Use a little white glue for this just because it flows a little bit more easily than uh than carpenters glue. Having done a few water tanks, I can tell you that this can kind of make or break the look of the whole thing. And what I've learned is you do not want to try and apply glue to this whole strip. You just want to do it to the first couple of inches and get it started on here. Start my first mark and go to the next one. Add some more glue. Another couple inches. Next mark. Another couple inches. Bring that all the way around. where it overlaps where you started. All right, one down. Uh, something it doesn't mention in the instructions, but it's something I always like to do when modeling a tank is to stagger where the tank bands begin. So, I've measured 5/8 of an inch away to the left of where that one started. I'm going start this one there. And the reason I want to do that is because when I put the u the band tighteners on there, uh they'll be staggered in a prototypical manner and they'll cover up where the uh paper bands begin and end. These are paper, so you don't want to pull too hard on them. Go. Okay. Got the bands all done. And now I'm installing the tank band fasteners or tighteners. Give each one a little bit of a bend in the middle. Since they're styrene, I'm using some uh CA to glue them on and push it down on top of the band. And like I said, I'm staggering each one of these about 5/8 of an inch apart. And around and around we go. Got the bands and the band fasteners all installed. That's almost too pretty to paint now, but painted we must if we want it to look like a real Grand Tank. So, I'm painting this with that uh Vallejo buff. But down near the bottom, I'm just kind of u kind of dry brushing a little bit to let some of those uh rusty bands show through. I added these dark water stains with some watercolors. Just took some cobalt blue and burnt sienna and mixed it up. Makes a nice warm gray. Kind of floated it on there. And now I'm going back over the whole thing and dry brushing on some antique white to make these streaks coming down. Remember, it's uh it's the 1930s on Barlo Pass, so things are going to be looking a little bit uh worse for wear and tear. At this point, I'm pretty satisfied with the way the tank is looking. So, I decided to go ahead and finish the roof. I opted uh for shingles instead of the the tar paper that comes with the kit. These are some laser cut paper shingles that I happen to have that are left over from an earlier project. Of course, you can use the uh the Campbell old Campbell rolled shingles uh if you like. In fact, that's what the kit calls for. I painted these uh kind of a a dirty gray, weathered gray, just spray can. And this takes a while because um every row has to be measured and fit to to match the angle of the corners there and then trimmed and and glued into place. Now, I know someone out there before you jump in my comments and say, "Hey, you can use double stick tape." But as I mentioned earlier in the video, not a fan. Not a fan of using tape, particularly cellophane tape like uh like this stuff. Use it for jigs and things like that uh during the assembly, but not for any permanent uh anything that's going to be permanently part of the model. It deteriorates over time, especially here in Arizona. It dries out and basically crumbles into dust. I'm using a little white glue for each and every row. One of the most timeconuming things was to go around and uh draw in all of the guidelines for the shingles about eighth of an inch apart. And this is still going to take a while longer. So, I think once again, we'll just jump ahead to when this is done and we'll pick it up there. I got all of the roof panels shingled and now I'm adding rows of solitary shingles as cap shingles. You could um use just a strip of folded paper. I often see that done in on the smaller scale models. I think a a row of actual shingles looks a lot better even though it takes a lot longer. Also, if you're going to lavish detail anywhere on a model, it should be on the roof because that's going to be, you know, the most visible part. And with that in mind, I swapped out the white metal casting of the roof hatch for actual wood. There, I'm about ready to install the final. That's this decorative ball that goes at the peak of the roof. These were usually painted gold or silver. I'm painting this one with a 50/50 mixture of Vallejo silver and Vallejo gunmetal to give me kind of an old silver look. A little CA on that and pop it right into this hole I drilled into the top of the roof. I've cut a short section of the ladder material that's provided. This is not something that's in the instructions, but it is something I have seen on Rio Grandwater tanks. Now, I just want to do a little weathering on this with some of my pan pastels. I want it to look like this roof has seen many, many Colorado winters. Then I'll go around and lift up some of the shingles here and there. It's an old trick, but a goodie. I think I'll get some dull coat on that and we'll call it good. The final sub assembly is the uh the spout yolk or spout frame. Putting that together. Now, if you build enough of these Craftsman style wood kits, you'll learn that every kit has at least one impossible task. And I found this one. This is a uh HO scale 6x6 6x6 by about 15 1/2 ft feet long. And what the instructions call for is is for you to cut a slot right there that holds a little white metal casting of a pulley reel. Now, I could spend an hour trying to figure out how to do this. Or I could take some HO scale 2 by six, use three of them, make a little sandwich, and leave that slot open. And once it's painted, it'll look just like a 6x6. So, let's do that instead. Got our little sandwich now with the wheel already installed. Work smart, not hard. Before I glue this to the back, I need to drill a hole through here big enough to fit this 12in pipe. So, I've got an eighth inch bit. I've already started the hole with a smaller bit. And now I'm going to go back and widen it. And now I'll use a rat tail file to finish that off. That'll work. Now I'm ready to hang the spout on there. And if you've ever been frustrated trying to hang a spout on a water tank, little trick I want to show you. First, I want to drill into the base of this spout casting using a size 64 bit. I want to go in about 1/8 to 316 of an inch. And then I want to glue some uh piece of u brass rod into that hole. And this is some 81 mm brass rod. Size doesn't matter all that much. Now I want to drill a matching hole into the yolk right above the hole for that uh 12-in pipe. Bend this rod back at about a 45 degree angle. Snip it off right about there. And then this goes through this hole. Now I want to trim that off right there and pot that in with a bunch more CA and some baking soda. And now just like that, we've got our tank spout firmly attached and not flopping around all over the place. Makes it a lot easier to do the rigging. So, what I'm going to do is glue one end of the chain into the hole here and then the other end to this little nub on the spout. Now, I'll attempt to do the same thing on the other side. Now, I'll get some paint on this and can do the final assembly. This gets glued to the front of the tank here. While at the same time, this pipe gets glued to the bottom of the tank coming right through the yolk like that. Okay. Now, this gets glued to the top of the stand. Now a bead of glue around the top rim of the tank. I'll just do a little final weathering pass. Some dust and grime on there using my chalks. I'm applying the chalk more heavily down towards the bottom because that's where the snow line would be. snow would gather up, drift against the sides of the structure. A lot of these tanks have a piece of flashing down around the bottom that would go over these uh these these roof beams or these support beams, but uh I kind of wanted them to be visible, so I left the flashing off in this in this case. I'll just add some rust on the chain and the spout and the other metal parts using my uh pastels here. And maybe just a little rust on off of these bands here on the side. All right, I think that's pretty good. I don't want to overdo it. I forgot is the uh water level indicator. And glue this on. I think right right about here. Now I just need to install the ladder, which is a little trickier than you might think. Just a little touch up here and there with the brown. Do believe the tank is done. Well, I just put on a final coat of clear matte finish to protect all that weathering. Think we can try the tank out in its intended location right here at the top of the grade where the tracks come into town. Well, that's not a bad start. Now I just need to build absolutely everything else on the layout. And I hope you'll stick around for that. I hope you're subscribed with the notifications turned on so YouTube will let you know when the next video is coming from Thunder Mesa Studio. And in the meantime, you can also follow over on Patreon for free. That's patreon.com/thunderma. or check us out on Instagram at thunder.ma and see the resources available on the ThunderMA studio website at thunder meesa.studio. As always, a huge thank you to our Patreon members who helped to make these videos possible and to Empire Trackworks for providing the H3 turnouts for this project. And with any luck, we'll actually be laying some track in the next installment of this build. Until then, keep moving forward everybody. Adios for now. [Music]