Ole Adobe!

"Be it every so humble, there's no place like a square box made out of mud bricks in the middle of the hot sun. Wait, is that rain coming?"
- Peppy

I love adobe structures! That's one of the main reasons I wanted to look at modeling the Mexican railroads. While I've never built one I'm thinking they would be fairly simple to construct.

Here are some photos...
The smooth and curving sides...solid wood doors...
Large wooden supports over windows and doors, thick and rugged bricks...
Teh ubiquitous wooden roof supports and the earthen colors...
The broken away stucco and the arches...
Oh...and the bullet holes.

Such character these buildings have! I'm thinking I'll start with a small square house. It can be the jump off place for several structures as the are all cubic in shape for the most part.


Here is a sketch I've made of a simple home using the key features that I find so attractive in adobe buildings. My thought is to cast plaster sides and then assemble and round off the corners by sanding. I'm open for other construction ideas.

Ok, my daughter wanted to draw, so I sat down with her and sketched a few more using her watercolor pens.


I decided that the town of Agua Caliente needed a bar. Why not use Rose's Cantina?Greasy Gonzalez's Oil Depot will need to stand out a bit more than this, but its a start.
The enginehouse needs to be a focal point on the back side, so it may include some interior details. I'm going to use Colin Claxon's fine "garage" model as a design base for this structure.

On30 Group Member Colin Claxon is a fantastic adobe structure builder and I'm learning from his work.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/On30/photos/album/953421824/pic/list

He says...

Scott,

The "barn" is 3/16 foam core with Durham's water putty over it. Some of the structures are 3/16 balsa. The exposed adobe brick are Fimo modeling clay. It was painted with washes of acrylic craft paint.(painted wet on wet) If you build one, the vigas go over the shortest distance not like I did it.

Thanks for the nice words.. Do check out Tom Yorkes models. They are quite good.

Colin Claxon

To learn about adobe architecture go to:
http://www.ihomesmagazine.com/newmexico/architecture.htm