How to Make Miniature Roofs from Cardboard, Part 3 Cont'd

The plain, back roof is done. Just a matter of laying row after row of cardboard slates. There was just the narrowest bit of the ridge-beam that wasn't covered, and that will be covered with the ridge-tiles.

Saturday was devoted in its entirety to doing the roof on the front of the workshop, the part with the louvers. This meant a lot of careful snipping and cutting to fit the various courses neatly around the little roof vents and the chimney. I found it helpful to mark, in pencil with a ruler, where the new course of slates overlapped the previous one. You also have to measure regularly from the tile courses to the ridge-beam, to make sure you are proceeding in a straight line. I had to fudge about 1/16" or 1-2 mm or two twice or so on each side to make the lines perfectly horizontal.

The first few rows are in place, they fit quite nicely with the bottoms of the louvers. From here on in, it is a lot of careful cutting while keeping the overlap of the tiles in place as much as possible. In a real old slate roof, the tiles get smaller as you get nearer the ridge-beam; however, in miniature I decided to just use regular courses.

It's done! Well, except for that ridge-tile course. With a flash the roof surface is far too shiny for my tastes, I will try matte varnish over it to see if that dulls things down. The chimney pots were decided on today as well; I am using a pair of resin pots I picked up at Birmingham Miniatura two years ago. One of them is somewhat crooked on the bottom, that will have to be shimmed when glued. The narrow top course of chimney brick will come off, and I will do a layer of bricks for the top of the chimney with nice little hollows for the pots. These days we use concrete as a cap on our chimneys, but all the photos I've seen of Tudor chimneys have brick caps. Fortunately, I have just enough paper clay left to do the chimney top.

Tomorrow I hope to start on the shop part of the Tudor Apothecary; the Workroom build is pretty much done, except for a few small finishing touches. The first weekend in April I hope to be at the CFB Shearwater Hobby Show in Halifax, NS, and my plan is to bring this building and its partner, in whatever state of completion it is by then, to display at the show, along with last year's Camp MiniHaHa project, the Anton Pieck-inspired Pawn Shop.