A water tower for Brookmere.
Okay – my layout is 4 levels (yes, 4), and I’ve started at the top, and Brookmere is a LONG way away from ever needing any structures, but I really, really, really wanted to do its water tower. It’s an enclosed structure, I think about 20,000 gallons. Now that I had learned how to cast parts, it would be easy to make some No. 2 windows, door, and roof segments.
The basic structure is easy – just clapboard styrene cut in strips. I’ve physically been to the prototype but of course did not bring a tape measure and so was left with guesswork from photos. But I got pretty close. The hardest part was getting the octagon shape aligned right, and the roof. For the octagon, I simply found one on the ‘interweb’ and printed it off, then used my photocopier to scale it properly for n-scale. Then I just glued the walls carefully together. The roof was trickier. Not knowing the math well, what I ended up doing was measuring from a photograph taken directly in front of the tower. I calculated the height of the roof, the width of each triangular roof panel at the widest end, and the radius to center of tower. Using the height and width, I calculated the hypoteneuse using an online calculator, which gave me how long the each panel would be from the wide base to the pointy top.
From there, I used my n-scale ruler to draw a line the width of the base of the triangle, found the center point, drew a line straight up from it, marked off the distance where the point should be (I think it was about 11 scale feet), and then used my ruler to make the sides of the triangle bisect it at the same angle. Once I had that, I cut it out, tested it on the model, and once satisfied cut some styrene. Just a couple pieces to make sure that they’d go together okay. I’ll do some detailing on one piece, cast it 8 times, and voila!
I put the basic tower together for now with the few scrap pieces I had cut. I think it looks pretty good, considering my limited skills!!