On the workbench today 12/20/18

A pile of FSM G.Wilikers castings.

FOS Dead Horse Bay kit.

J.Keen Supply by Railroad Kits

This is an open letter for you, dear eBay sellers. Please make it easier for us buyers to spot your kit by not spilling the guts of it and using that as your main picture. Several years back eBay had a dedicated category for the craftsman kits with usually several hundred items in it. There used to be about 3 pages of new items every day. There was also the time when you had to pay a fee to have a picture displayed next to your auction title in the list. Even without the pictures it wasn't too difficult to scan through 150 or so auction titles. Then eBay made pictures free and consolidated several structure categories into one broader which now days has close to 40k auctions with 20+ pages of new items every day. It takes considerable amount of time to scan them through . By scan I mean to take a quick glance at the pictures while scrolling at pretty high pace. In this situation the eye can catch only certain shapes or colors like yellow FSM box, red Southriver box, a picture FOS built structure, since FOS doesn't have uniform way of packaging their kits, etc. Even the picture of a kit built by someone else other than manufacturer is detrimental no matter how good the build is. In case of FSM I would more likely miss it if a picture of the same structure on Georges layout or add from a magazine is used instead of the yellow box. What chances are of me spotting the spilled guts?
If you checked some of  my "On the workbench today..." posts you may know that I have been working on J.Keen Supply kit for some time. Now, it is finished and all it is left is to wrapped it up. It was more less out of the box build with the exception of the roof top sign. I cut it with the help of Cricut cutting machine. It took me two attempts to do it. First time I used a sheet of cardstock straight from the package. Due to the thickness and small size of the letters the machine made a bit of mess. Removing the sign off the sticky pad proved to be impossible. Then I applied a wood hardener to another sheet of the same cardstock and let it dry. Second time  it worked much better although I still had hard time removing the sign off the pad. If I remember correctly there are pads of different stickiness available, so this issue may be easily addressed. The quality of the cut was acceptable but far from great. It looks like it is the limit of what the machine can do given the material and the size of the graphics. I might try thin styrene instead next time. Overall I am OK with how did the structure turn out. Without the sign it probably would have looked better, but you would never know without trying.

FOS Winger Paper Bag Co. Pt. 2

There is one thing that has been bugging me for some time. I hat is off to everyone who takes time to make a video of their favorite technique, a video tutorial, etc. I watch those now and then. Now, my problem is if someone no matter how talented posts an hour and half video of a build. Does everyone else in the world besides me have way too much time on their hands? I can only spare perhaps 30 minutes while eating dinner and thus I prefer up to ten minutes concentrated videos on a single topic. Of all people who I am following I think Luke Towan has it nailed perfectly. He has some half an hour or so videos, but his technique videos are some 7-8 minutes long.
Let's get to the topic of this post...
The Winger's wasn't at the top of the list of the started projects that intended to finish in the nearest future, but here we are. There was so little left to be done, but the motivation was nowhere to be found. I think the spark that re-ignited it was all scenery work I did on Chippy's and Gusano Loco dioramas. Now, if I could just sell it quickly...

On the workbench today 12/01/18

The landscapers visited Gusano Loco for the last time and unfortunately left some trash.

Then they stopped by Wingers Paper Co.

J.Keen loves old signs.