Dollhouse critique

[Larry Robinson]

Joe,
I think you have done an excellant job, I too have to agree that shingles are needed and the ones you added look great. I would suggest that you offer them as an add on option. Bet you will have a lot of customers coming back to add them when they are done building the house.

Larry

[Peter Meacham]

Joe

For roofing, could you not vector engrave the roof panel with a shingle or tile type of pattern? That would add a small amount of time to the making of the project but not add any materials.

Pete

[Joe Hillmann]

Here are pictures of the fully shingled house. Once the glue dried the bow got pulled out of the shingles and they are all laying nice and flat now. I still need to cut and paint some trim pieces to cover the tabs where the floors stick through the sides.
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I think in order to keep the cost of the basic kit low I am going to include the individual cut shingles that I will make on the lathe with the kit and then sell the laser cut shingles as an accessory.

[Mel Fulks]

It's nice,hope you do well with it. Just wondering about the scale,I think most of the furnishings available are are 1 inch to one foot.

[George Brown]

Now it looks really sharp. Covering up those black edges really helped.

What material is is made of, looks like thin baltic birch plywood?

[Joe Hillmann]

Mell, 1":1' is the most common, the problem with that is the bed on my laser is only 18x32 so at that scale I am very limited. This is 1/2 scale or 1/2":1" which ends up being very close to G scale in model trains. If I get rid of the tabs I can and a back wall, scale it down by 50% and then I end up with O scale, and if I reduce it another 50% I end up at HO scale. I could go smaller and get into z and N but at some point the detail will be lost. This allows me to hit 5 markets with one design.

[Mel Fulks]

Makes perfect sense now. The new pictures are remarkably real looking !

[Joe Hillmann]

This one is made of reject door skins from a factory near me, they are maple on one side and hardboard on the back. They are .11 thick so I can make a half scale model of this for o scale by laminating two pieces of .027 veneer and a Ho scale by using a single thickness of .027 veneer and all the tabs fit without modification. But the problem is I only have a few dozen sheets of .027 veneer and after calling around everything else I can get it .022 unless I have it custom made.

[Joe Hillmann]

And a 1/88 model (1/87 is HO in model railroads, I don't think the difference will matter)
It's 2 1/2 inches tall. It is the same file as I used for the bigger one just shrunk to 25% size. I need to make the dividers in the windows bigger and the top and bottom of the shutters bigger, for the most part they were burned away. I also need to make the deck railing a bit fatter, it is very fragile.
DSCF4392.jpgDSCF4393.jpgDSCF4394.jpgDSCF4395.jpgDSCF4396.jpgDSCF4397.jpg

[Joe Hillmann]

I just rechecked my math and the small one is actually 1/96 scale, not 1/88 so it is quite a bit smaller than HO scale. That May be an issue.

[walter hofmann]

Hi
first I like it very much I wana try this how you guys design it what do you use ? do you use ready made templates?
for shingles I would use selfadhesive veneer strips first engrave the shingles outline then cut a hole row they can then
cut by the customer to size.
greetings
waltfl