Chooch Enterprises Feed & Grain

[Oldguy]

My town of Grandview needs a feed/seed store.  Several in along the Frisco Highline had houses as an office to handle the sales portion of the operation.  I have two of the Chooch Feed and Grain Store and I had an itch to build one.  So here I go.
Obligatory kit contents.  Instructions are rather basic - assemble per figure {whatever}.  The main castings are urethane and warped like crazy.  It took judicious use of a heat gun and weights to get the backs flat.  However, the metal castings are absolutely gorgeous. The instructions had a sad note.  Sherry Collins was in the process of completing them when she passed away.  Maybe that's why they are a bit abbreviated.  Dunno.
The other issue was trying to get the walls square and parallel.

[Oldguy]

First up was priming the metal and plastic castings.  The structure will be white body and red trim.  The brown walls should allow the white paint to look faded after a coat or two.  We'll see.
The front wall is the controlling side and went together fairly easy.  But it still need some 1x material for the window/door assembly to fit tighter.  The front is elevated a bit and I didn't like the look of the 2x material on edge covered by cardboard for the front entry.  Then, there is no interior floor.  The depth of the 2x material and cardboard came to close to .100", so a piece of .06 and .04 plastic was used for both the front walkway and interior floor.  I found a wood floor texture and added it to the floor.
I used the same print for the back wall of the blacksmith addition.  One can't tell looking at it straight on, but the wall seen here is three times thicker at the top and bottom than at the middle.

[Oldguy]

The blacksmith annex is supposed to go next to the store.   Of course, I messed up and extended the store roof down to where I thought it looked good, but interfered with annex placement.  So I needed to add additional roof supports. 

I just don't like cardboard in kits.  So, I replaced the roof cards with 0.04" plastic stock.  I bought a couple of pounds of plastic leftovers from Downtown Deco and they have come in handy.
The dormer sides were to be cardboard and they were replaced with wood siding.  Then I realized that the dormer roof placement wasn't going to be all that strong, so I added some internal supports.
I did paint the included roofing strips black and added those, using transfer tape  I made a jig to cut in the rafter tails.
I figured out a way to import a Google Street View image into Word and make my May Milling sign and attached it to the front of the store.

[Janbouli]

Great job Bob, some great detail in that store front.

[jerryrbeach]

Bob,

Wow! You managed to straighten the walls and get everything together with nice square joints.   The faded white paint came out well, storefront looks great.  Despite the challenges posed by older resin kits, you are making excellent progress.  I'm glad you're sharing this build with us. 

[Opa George]

Bob, nice job on this kit.  I have a soft spot for Chooch kits and castings. They were one of the first product lines I tried when I was ready to venture away from the inexpensive plastic building kits back in the 70s.  Maybe it was because my local hobby shop had a lot of their stuff.  Anyway,  very nice.
--George

[PRR Modeler]

Very nice Bob.

[Oldguy]

Thanks all for the encouragement.

Since I might use the annex elsewhere, it needed an end.  Some spare 8x8's and B&B siding and I've got an end.  I also made up the loading dock.  Again, it was to be decked with cardboard.  Nope.  Used some siding as a base, then topped with 2x10's.
There is a covered area on one end, but it would be extremely fragile as shown.  So I made a concrete pad for strength and then decided to make a concrete floor for the annex as well.  As with everything else, it is roofed with cardboard.  I think some old metal roofing would be spot on for this addition.  But I don't have any on hand.   Well I do, but it's in the next kit build.  So, this is on hold for a bit as I move to the next build.