Mocked by the Mockup (Part 2)

So, last time I talked about my decision process on whether to build a wood and cardstock mock-up of the large General Motors building. Spoiler alert: I was in.

I do, however, want to call out this quote from that post:

Normally, I’d jump right in and start construction on what would become the final styrene structure, but to be honest, that doesn’t always work out so well. In the past I’ve gotten mixed result going that route for bigger projects…

Cut to a couple of months later.

That thing about mixed results? Yeah, same thing applies here, it turns out. I built the better part of the building skeleton from wood, but abandoned it after running into issues.

To be fair, the mock-up did its job, or at least most of it. It convinced me that I liked the general design of the structure. But the biggest benefit was that it drove home the heft of this building. I mean, I knew it was going to be big, but once you see it framed out, you really get it. It will definitely be the focus of attention for that corner once it’s complete.

So, on the pro side:

• Yes, the wood was cheap, and access to it was easy
• I got a good feel for the dimensions
• I  discovered some bad assumptions I made with framing and measurements, so I made my mistakes on the cheaper material
• It convinced me that I must have a removable roof. Once those cars go in, they’ll be really hard to grab, and the idea of moving this structure often doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies.

There was really only one con, but it was a major con: At the end of the day, wood is… well… wood.

Yes, it glues easily, but it warps badly. Translation: when you have a wall that’s over a yard long, there’s no way you’re going to get it to be straight, no matter how much you brace it.

Warping forced the building to bow. So much, in fact, that cars that should have glided by with reasonable clearance (I measured many times) kept hitting the side unless I tacked the wood frame to the surface,. Even then, it eventually worked its way out of alignment. The wall lengths were simply too much to overcome.

But, lessons learned. The door openings are now wider, and the longest part of the building (where the 86′ car is in the photo) is now narrower, which provides much better access for the 60′ cars.

As you can also see from the photos, I never got to the point of getting the cardstock attached to the wooden sides. Heck, I didn’t even finish the framing.

I got so frustrated that I reverted to old habits and started from scratch using styrene, (photos to come) hoping that I had figured out the measurements enough that I wouldn’t screw up too badly moving forward and that doors & loading docks worked as planned. (So far, so good.)

Ultimately, I didn’t find that the wood version went together any quicker than the styrene version, and that was supposed to be a big benefit to the mock-up. The skeletal structure you see in the photos took me a more than a few evenings to build, and I don’t feel like I even got that far on it. Version 2.0 (the styrene version) seems to be moving at a similar pace. And it’s more dimensionally stable.

My major takeaway from this project is that while it did certainly do the job of providing a physical representation of the structure to validate assumptions, mock-ups made of wood are probably better suited for smaller structures.

Final thought: I could look at the experiment as a failure, but I don’t. Even though I didn’t necessarily achieve the results I was looking for, I still learned a lot from the project. These are lessons I can apply to future projects. Which, in the end, is part and parcel of any modeling project.