Thornycroft Building #12 - Case Hardening Shop

In the photo below this building is on the left directly behind the long building with three ridge roofs.

  The Thornycrofts Motor Works, Basingstoke, 1928 - Britain from Above

Function 

The left hand half was the Case Hardening shop. Case hardening is a process of heating a metal iron object to harden the surface layer. Inside the building were several electrically controlled furnaces.

On the end was a boiler house (construction post dates the photo above), the boiler(s) being fired with sawdust waste from the wood working shop. It may have fed steam to the pickling shed located next to the railway siding.

The right hand half of the building was the packing shed.

Time Line

The packing shed was built in 1916 and the case hardening shop added in 1919. The small boiler house on the end appeared between 1928 and 1939. The chimney was demolished later but the main buildings survived until the end. They had undergone some remodelling in later years, being extended across the rear alley to join the next building and the roof line changed from seven saw tooth's to nine and covered in corrugations.

Construction

The packing shed was of the same architecture and construction as building #6 and assumed to have a similar shingle roof covering for the period of our model. The case hardening shop was not the exact same style. It's wall construction is not clear from available photographs of the exterior. It could have been brick but an interior photograph suggests corrugated walls. The boiler house construction is even less clear but probably brick. The boiler house roof seems to have also been its water storage tank. A tall external chimney connected to the boiler house. An ash dump was located at the other end.

The Model

Here is the model on our layout plan in a similar orientation as above. Building #10 has been permanently fixed to it because it was was integral to the packing shed described here.

Designed in a graphic editing application, ink jet printed and stuck to card. 

The case hardening shop is shown in brick. If photographic evidence materialises to confirm it was corrugated iron then it would not be too difficult to overlay paper depicting this. The building butts to the back scene so the rear walls are not modelled. In fact the real building is deeper than that modelled, the remainder being in the back scene. The windows, including skylights, are opaque.

 

The chimney is 3D printed in plastic and covered in brick paper. None of the buildings on the layout are permanent fixtures and can be removed for storage. In the case of the chimney, being rather tall, it is a separate model. Its hollow interior enables it to be held in place by a bolt sticking up through the baseboard.

The boiler house, being a later addition, obscures the tall windows on the end of the case hardening shop.

The ash dump walls are simulated railway sleepers and purely fictitious as no clear photo of its construction is available. The water in the roof tank is a photograph of tank water. It is quite realistic with shadow and ripples.

David