CSM Plant Food

The WCMR needed a customer and so CSM Plant Food is born. I've been picking up plastic "For Sale" signs and others like them for raw material for a weekend just like this. Friday, a half day of vacation and the need to decompress from the week prior lured me to the basement where construction began.

I started out by making the basic shell of the building. Some Evergreen square styrene gave me something to use as corner blocks. I know, that's cheating but as they say "Whatcha gonna do?" I had the basic structure and roof completed by Friday evening.

Saturday I stole a few hours to continue on the project and got it painted and the eaves of the roof boxed in. It seemed like it needed something more so I began construction of a concrete sidewall that would raise the building a few feet and seemed to make it more plausible for a heavily used fertilizer plant. I painted the main building (twice, the first time the color was wrong) and installed a shingled roof that I printed out after downloading from the internet. The cap shingles took the longest, as I installed them one at a time after cutting them out of the printout.

Sunday was the day when everything started to come together. The concrete wall was installed, and the doors built and put in place. I ran trim around the big end door and cut the door from a sign. I even managed to scribe lines to simulate the panels in an overhead door. Finally, I trimmed out the corners of the building. Here it is:


The roof defect is from a seam in the shingle sheet I printed. I'll need to plan more carefully in the future to try and avoid the need for such a seam. I have a plan for how to disguise it, though. Hopefully it will work out and not look so bad.




Obviously it's still lacking a way to get the product in and out. That should be rectified soon as I have a couple of Rix grain elevator legs on order. I've also been looking at building a leg myself. Actually it doesn't look awfully hard, with the exception of the railing around the platform and the ladder and cage.

And the name-anyone got a guess as to what the CSM in "CSM Plant Food" might stand for? Hopefully I'll be able to come up with some catchy phrase to associate with the acronym.

It was a fun project, and I'm already looking forward to the next one. I learned a lot doing this and should be able to produce a better result when I try again.