Ag Press Manhattan Kansas Scratchbuilt

I could only find 2 pictures of Ag Press on the net, both are from the front. I searched the building on Google maps to have at least a picture from above. The building is too large for where I am going to place it on my layout , so compression is needed. I will make it less deep and less wide.

A picture of the front office part.

Another pic of the office, I used this to give me some idea of sizes and scale.

I took the above pic and overdrew some lines in Coreldraw, then printed this as much to scale as I thought it would be.

A clean workspace to start with.

The office building walls are 48 mm high and the front wall is 130 mm wide. That would be about 23 yards wide.

For the round corners I used 16mm electrical tubing and 1/4 part of 20mm tube, I glued these together so I would have an edge to place the wall against.

Getting the front and side walls square.

The substructure for the office glued and drying.

Brickwalls from Slaters

The pieces to the doorway to the office.

Trying out something I think will work for the glass cube window/walls. It's the transfer tape I use, wich is a bit milky white, and strips of insectscreen.

As suggested , I did a little experiment with in my case Micro Klear, I filled the insectscreen with it using a soft brush, I did 2 layers , the first with all the strokes from the left the 2nd from the right so as to fill right up against the edges.

This is what it looks like, I think I shouldn't have taken a macro pic of this , it looks so much bewtter from 2 feet away.

In fact it looks so good that I decided to do this for the front office part of the building. I stuck the strips of insect screen to the transfer tape. I know from my experiment that the finished strokes will bend easy without breaking or letting go of the Micro Klear.

Waiting to dry and clear up.

In the meantime I cut brick walls for the rest of the building, this is where the steel square glued to a glass plate comes in handy. Lay the brick wall sheet against the square.

Lay the base wall on top and cut off.

The front wall and office with trims. Next the glazing and further trims , then painting.

Glazing placed , and a coat of Tamiya Buff on the bricks and trims.

Cut out the windows, painted glossy black ( lower level ) , glossy white ( upper level ) , lower level windows also covered with Micro Klear. The door is made using a Tichy door and some leftover Peel 'n stick trimming painted flat aluminum. The cross bar and doorknob are also made with Peel 'n stick, this works much tidier then glueing.

Putting the walls together, just some large styrene strip in the corners to keep in place.

Next some triangles of styrene to make it all square, and some styrene against the walls to determine the height of the roof.

The bottom of the structure in this stage.

Pieces of the roof and the remaining part of the backwall glued together using the metal square to get things square.

While everything is curing, I made some frame parts for the front windows, yes they are that tiny.

The frames made and the roof in place.

Transfer tape on the roof. I made tarpaper out of linnen cardboard, that I cut in to strokes.

Here is the finished roof.

A little closer.

Almost the same picture as before but looking much better with a tarpapered roof.

Made trims out of styrene strip, yes it's a bit wide compared to the prototype, but I like how you can hide other things that look worse then large trims.

Some of the roof details after a first coat of paint.

Lettering in place, these are letters from Slaters, they have them in many different sizes.

Weathered the roof, first a dry brush with light grey to highlight the seems of the tarpaper, it's grey not black in the picture from google aerth , then some white patches where the airconditioning units will go, and then some brown debris representing the leaves that have rotted in the winter ( I'm modelling spring almost summer 1960 ) , it piled up in the corners where the wind blew it.

First layer of static grass, 2 additional colors will be added.

Roof details placed.

Some pictures of the finished structure, the cars are in for the pictures.