Ok, so I'm not bashing this kit too hard at the moment, but here's what I have so far.
I've been picking away at this one, a little bit every couple of days, for a while now. I guess I'm mostly doing a lot of thinking about how to proceed next rather than actually doing the work. But that's how it goes it you want things to look right.
About the only change/bash I've made so far is the addition of a light at the top of the distribution tower, with the help of a tiny surface-mount LED. The kit came with the tower and two grain bins. I bought a third bin, made it two bands shorter, and donated one band to each of the other two bins, making them larger than in the original kit. I plan to buy more bins soon but this is a good start.
The base is a square of styrene plastic, painted with gray automotive primer. The gray colour will be a good base, when weathered, to look like concrete. There is another base piece at the foot of the tower, to which I'll glue one of the extra bin doors that come with the kit to, presumably, allow access to the machinery pit underground, below the tower. (Mike Rowe cleaned one of these on an episide of "Dirty Jobs", if you're interested. I know I was.)
Still to come: grate under the track to unload cars, grate to unload trucks, distribution piping, ladders on tower, an office building, weather shelters above the unloading grates, plus whatever else I can come up with, like a truck scale and spilled product. (Look, here come the rats, already...)
The sad part is that we used to occasionally get grain from a much larger place like this (Steam Mill, Nova Scotia) and I didn't pay much attention to how it worked. My fun was in being on my own with the dump truck. Farm kids enjoy that sort of thing. :-)
-mike
Joined: 2005-10-27