While trying to plan out the town and surrounding area involved in our model train layout I have discovered that I’m not very happy with my choices for structures. Call me silly, but I really don’t want my plastic structures to look like plastic. It’s why I’ve been spending so much time trying to get the finishing techniques just right for our buildings.

My biggest issue has been the church. In my head I know exactly what I want. The problem is that I can only find it in plastic, and not very good plastic at that…

Jay decided that he would try to make a church for me. He drew up the first iteration and it was very close! To help iron out some of the details we pulled up images of country churches online and I showed him what I was picturing in my head.

Due to the wonderful world of technology, and Jay’s ability to translate my thoughts into actual projects, we were able to come up with….

My 3D printed church! This looks a little rough right now, but we have some cleaning up to do and then the finishing.

For instance, I’m going to go online and find pictures of stained glass windows. I will print them out on either thin velum or the overhead projector sheets, cut them out, and place them on the inside of the church windows. Won’t that be pretty?

Also, please note that my church has a steeple! If you were to open the doors I’m sure you would see all of the people!

Here is the side of the church (please note that the roof has not been installed… if you’ve ever worked with general contractors you know that it takes them FOREVER to show up and get the work done!). What really sells this building, I think, is the lapped siding. Poor Jay had to draw every single line for the siding in the program that he uses. It was very time consuming, but definitely worth it.

He has also been drawing up different houses to assemble for the layout. After all, the congregation has to have somewhere to live. We can’t have the town full of roaming homeless people!

One of the other structure projects that Jay has been working on are these lighting units. Each building will have one installed so that we can light up the interior at ‘night’. Can you imagine how awesome the stained glass windows will look on the church when all lit up?!

They don’t look very big, but these are LEDs so they put out a lot of light! Jay has used the warm white so that it won’t be so harsh and he will be able to control the intensity when it’s all wired up to the controller.

I see even more detail work to be done in my future!