Birdoggydog's Builds

Building the town's barns, silos and mine head from a kit

Ten working building kinds, from a barn to a mine head, laid from 18 new kit pieces, and three kinds a judge sent back for the wrong proportions.

The town now has its working buildings. There are ten kinds: a barn, a granary, a smithy, a grain silo with its elevator leg, a water tower, a works hall, a warehouse, a mine head, a kiln, and the tall stacks, with a dead fallen one among them. Each kind is a row in its own table, and a script lays it from the art kit’s pieces.

A 55 second walk past the new kinds. It’s hazy because the world’s haze is on at that hour.

What are the 18 new pieces?

The kit needed pieces a house doesn’t use. There are wide cart and dock doors, a dock canopy, a hoist beam, Warren roof trusses, a saw-tooth roof, lattice legs for the towers and the mine headframe, drum tanks and their tops, a kiln cap, and a fallen chimney stack. The game pins one commit of the kit, so I moved the pin first and then wrote the script that lays the kinds.

How do they go together?

The works hall is one room under three Warren trusses, 8 m clear, with no column in it, and a saw-tooth roof on top. The warehouse has a dock canopy over its door at 4.2 m, a loading door on each upper storey and a hoist. The mine head is lattice legs, one storey per member, with struts and a sheave cap that carries two wheels. The kiln is a brick bottle on its drum, under a kiln cap. The smithy has louvered windows and its stack on the ridge.

Eight frames from the film: the farmstead, the barn, the smithy, the silo and water tower, the works hall from behind, the warehouse, the mine head and kiln, and the fallen stack.
One frame per kind, with what to look at in the caption.

Why did a judge send three kinds back?

A judge looked at the first round and sent back three kinds, and all three were wrong in proportion.

  • The barn looked like a narrow town house with a garage door. It’s now long and low, one storey, with its long side to the street and the cart door in the middle.
  • The silo looked like a squat vat. It’s now four storeys on the smallest ring, about 4.5 times as tall as it is wide, and its elevator leg is level with its top.
  • The fallen stack’s broken top showed no dark hole, and its fallen lengths were a flat slab. The top is now torn open onto a sooted flue, and the lengths are round with dark bores.

I think the lesson is the useful part. A kind reads by its proportions before its details, so from now on each one gets checked against the real thing before I film it.

Also done

  • Not yet: the barn’s hay loft door. The kit has no gable with a door in it yet.