Okay, this post was supposed to be up last night, but a strong line of storms blew through our area and knocked my internet out. So we’ve conveniently been without internet for over 24 hours now. I had to go to a local Sheetz convenience store with free wifi to get this post up and to work on tomorrow’s podcast.
It’s all good now, and thankfully for their fast internet and 5 piece chicken strips, I was able to get this posted and the podcast episodes for tomorrow are all ready to roll!
Now about this sweet kit!
I’ll just say at the beginning of this write-up, that this kit was a fantastic build. I loved building it, had a ton of fun building it, and I will admit that it provided a pretty decent challenge at times when working on the structure.
The Tucker Factory is an original design by Howard Zane which is even more special to us now since we had the opportunity to interview him on one of our recent podcast episodes. Just having a structure designed by Howard Zane on our layout means a lot to us and we’re proud to put it in our city.
Right away when you open up the box, you’ll see that there are a TON of detail parts. It’s great if you love painting the small detail parts, which thankfully I do!
The structure’s footprint is 4-1/2″ x 13-1/2″ and one it’s completed it packs a lot of depth, dimension, and detail.
Prepping and Painting
The preparation of this structure is like almost all other structures you’ve likely built. Adding the bracing and painting the trim pieces to the color you’ve selected. I chose to build the kit I got as close to the original photo of the kit as possible, while still adding my own flair to it.
The next step I took after adding all the bracing was just applying a simple India ink wash to the walls. Everyone should have this on their workbench, it’s such a simple thing to make and keep around and I think it’s essential to building great structures. I used my darker India ink wash mix and the way I applied the paint in my next step really added a lot of depth to the color of the walls.
So after the India ink wash was dried, I painted the walls with Apple Barrel Barn Red acrylic paint. But I didn’t slather a nice even and thick layer of paint on the walls. I actually used a new technique that I learned from Jason Jensen on one of our interviews for our podcast and I dry brushed the barn red paint on.
Not only did I dry brush the base color on, I also dry brushed on two other colors including Folk Art Barnwood and Mushroom on top of the Barn Red color to create the effect of worn and missing red paint on the clapboard siding. Personally, I think the dry brush technique turned out amazing and I will definitely be using it a lot more on future builds.
You can see the effect that was achieved in this photo of the wall sections before assembly. It looks like parts of the barn red paint is peeling and worn down to the wood boards.
Assembly Time
This kit wasn’t too difficult to assemble but it is a lot different then your typical square or rectangular building and since it has odd angles and unique corners, it adds a bit of a challenge at the assembly. But as I said, if you’ve built a few kits or have scratch-built a couple structures in the past, you should have no problem assembling this one. I did assemble each of the end structures as separate buildings and then connected them with the middle part once the glue was dried.
There are some extra trim pieces that go around the top of the structure that we painted the same white as the corner trim pieces. I added them after the three structures were assembled and glued together. This broke from the instructions a little, but it all worked out a looked the same in my book as I wanted to achieve.
At this time I also assembled, painted and added the docks, and stairs to the structure. The dock was only colored with multiple layers of India ink wash and then weathered with chalk to make it look like there were busier sections from foot traffic.
Detail parts were also painted at this time. My method for painting these parts is very simple and starts with me spray painting the parts with my flat black spray paint. Once it dries, I dry brush the desired colors on, sometimes in multiple layers and colors to achieve the most realistic look you can ask for.
The last couple steps of this kit were to add the painted detail parts and begin weathering.
Adding Details, the fun part:
This step is cake and might be the most enjoyable part of building a structure. I just started placing the details where I thought they would make the most sense if it were a real-life working factory and where they drew the eye into specific areas of the building.
The Tucker Factory came with a lot of warehouse and factory details including barrels, trash cans, brooms and things you’d expect to see around a loading dock of a working factory or warehouse. These are things that most kits tend to come with and while fun to paint, are pretty generic.
But I will say that this kit came with some very cool parts that I had a blast with. This included vacuum ventilators for the side of the building and what I thought was the coolest part of the entire build… A rooftop water tank.
The rooftop water tank was a kit on its own and included in the box. I think this was easily my favorite part of the kit build. Maybe because you don’t usually receive things like this in kits, or that it adds so much character to the structure. I’m just in love with the water tank… I know, weird. But I loved making it!
The last thing that I think needs talked about with the Tucker Factory is that it came with foundation material to add a stone foundation. This is something that you don’t see on a lot of buildings from kit manufacturers and when you think about buildings you see in real life, you can almost always see a foundation sticking up above the ground. It’s definitely a detail that we need to think about more with our model railroad layouts and one that I’ll be adding to a lot of my buildings from here out.
Building Wrap-Up
I had a blast working on this kit and I would recommend this building to anyone looking for a good sized industrial building for their layout. It’s big, but not too big that it’s going to take up an extreme amount of space and it packs an insane amount of detail.
When we first got our hands on the kit from CCK, there were only one or two left, but Jeff has released another run of this kit and it’s available now for a limited time! It’s also (at the time of writing this summary on the kit) on sale for $199 (normally $245).
Check out the kit here: HO Scale Tucker Factory – Design by Howard Zane – Carolina Craftsman Kits
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