Slating

So the time has come to start slating the roof of the first Oberon Wood house.

For this job I'm choosing to use rows of thick paper strips which are cut to represent the individual slates.

This is the same technique I employed on the farm buildings at Cwn Cloch and I find it the best solution to represent traditional Welsh roofing slates.

There is a very good commercial product on the market produced by Slater's. Unlike most embossed plasticard sheets they have the proper three dimensional overlap, but the downside is the sheets are quite small and they are very thick (about 60 thou) and rather hard to cut to shape.

So instead I've developed this method which I first used on a model of Minffordd Weigh House I was asked to make as a retirement gift for the FR's Fred Howes.

That is why the slate shapes you see here have a diamond shape at one end because this sheet - which I drew on the PC at home and shrank to scale on the office photocopier - was intended for the ornate slates on the roof if this building.

However it works just as well for conventional, rectangular slates if you turn them 180 degrees.

They are cut from the sheet into rows and I cut a slice with the tip of my scalpel two thirds of the way up each line - enough to separate the slates while still leaving the row in one piece - before gluing them in place with a smear of PVA onto the styrene.

And repeat....

Eventually when all the rows are in place you end up with a full roof of slates, thus.

The trickiest bit is to get all the rows level and equally spaced.

I will be the first to admit they rarely come out without one row slightly different to the rest, but I guess that's the essence of s scratch built model, isn't it?