Just for sharing/education I thought I would describe how I usually find the scales of things from photos, which I do a lot for my sculptures. Here’s one wall of the map room in the NY Public Library, I already know it’s 34 feet wide because I found that fact in an article, so I would first look around for something of known size, if an adult person is standing there you can use a rounded out 6 feet for the scale, in this case the only known size is the width of the room. Now I want to find out the size of the corbels in that cornice or…

I was reading a number of articles on this gothic styled 60 story building which is now 100 Years old, the whole of the facade is made up of over 16 MILLION pounds of terracotta made by the Atlantic TC Co. The building’s facade has more than 400,000 units of terra cotta. Due to the lack of maintenance, the anchors attaching the terra cotta to the steel frame rusted and caused widespread damage to the terracotta panels. Many broken pieces have had to be replaced with new terracotta, or in some cases, an alternative material which these days is usually cheap fiberglass replicas or fiberglass reinforced concrete. By 1978, just…

Unfortunately only two people on my mailing list responded to the last newsletter asking for input on interest in any of the 10 or so photos of possible designs for the next model. I’m leaning a lot towards this Assyrian themed Art Deco on the 1928 Ageloff Tower building, I remember seeing this in person years ago. It measures over 9-1/2 feet wide on the building, if I did one half of it as shown by the red box and reduced it’s scale a little a 19-7/8″ x 30-3/4″ model would retain the same proportions and be a more practical size. It would be a pretty easy model to make…

I decided to stain the floor, door and wainscot to see how they look using Cabot Walnut stain, the mahogany floor looks very good in person, a bit red in the photos, but the color in person looks nice, as well as aged, the basswood doesn’t stain really evenly but gee, in the future there’s no reason I couldn’t make the wainscot out of mahogany, ditto for the stairs, the only issue would be the moldings, I’m not thrilled by the design of the Northern scale lumber’s baseboard profile I could come up with a much better one if I research what machine it could be cut on and have…

I decided to make a miniature room, something I’ve wanted to do for many years but never got around to it, here is the progress thus far: