Thornycroft Building #6 - Stock/Paint/Wood

In the photo below this building, with its four entrances, is on the left of the factory directly next to the white ended building.

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

 Function

The building contained three departments. The left most bay was a stock vehicle garage. The next bay was the paint shop and the two bays on the right a wood working shop where vehicle bodies were manufactured.

Time Line

Originally a single corrugated iron building with curved roof and cupola stood where the fourth bay is and  was used for wheel and body manufacture. The land between this and the timber drying shed (white ended building) was a vacant plot.

By 1914 the two bay building on the left was in place with a white frontage but set back from the line of the timber drying shed. By 1919 the third bay was added and the entire building frontage brought forward in line with the timber drying shed. The original corrugated building was incorporated in this re-structuring and extended to the east with its extension given a flat roof. After the 1940s the entire roof of this bay was replaced by a corrugated iron pitch roof with corrugated skylights.

The building survived until the end.

Construction

Brick with saw-tooth roof style. North, west and east walls were pierced with tall windows. Four sets of large double entrance doors fitted to front.

The saw-tooth roof had skylights fitted on the short side. Rectangular shingles to the other. A matrix of supporting beams linked the roofs. The fourth bay roof was curved corrugated iron with a cupola running almost the full length in the 1920s/30s, the period of our model..

The Model

The next photo shows the model in situ on our full sized layout plan in a similar orientation to the real building shown above.

The design and general construction is the same as the Wood Store. The building is raised on a 4mm plinth that will disappear into the ground on the layout.

The east end is incomplete because we hit the end of the available space on our baseboard. In fact the building butts onto the back scene in a 'low relief' fashion. The split line fell inconveniently down the fourth bay double doors and its window above. To avoid this I moved the doors a little further along than the prototype so they move off the model and into the back scene. That's OK until I discovered that this places the cupola half on model and half in the back scene! It would have been better to have a truncated door of only a few centimetres so that the full cupola could be modelled. As it is we have a truncated cupola of 19.5 centimetres!

Not the largest building on our plan but possibly the most complex having much architectural detail that took a long time to design and make (at least 80 hours).

Each garage door is twice the width of what you see and slides between guides fitted at the rear. Opening is achieved simply by pushing with a scalpel blade but closing is more tricky and is achieved by pressing the blade point into the door to pull it across - not to be done too often.

This building has working interior lights (a Livarno 3 strip set from Lidl) so, all windows are transparent. An excellent method of making transparent windows with ultra thin glazing bars (I achieved about one third of a millimeter) was found here. It was quite therapeutic making these.

Drain pipes are fitted because they are quite noticeable on the prototype.

The roof beams include small curved supports. These were made using a hole punch for the inner curve and then cutting the outer curve and the straight upright with scissors.

The final photo below shows an early evening  moonlit scene in winter with the building interior lights ablaze indicating the working day is not yet over!

The LED strip is a little too bright so, we'll obtain a dimmer in due course to control the brightness.

David