Église de St-Nectaire - Secanda

[gregoy]

It's been a while that I've built an more complex model, so this time I chose to build the Église de St-Nectaire, from Secanda. It's the first time I'm bulding an model from the author, and so far the experience is being good.
This model takes 30 pages and the instructions for this and many other models from Secanda catalog are pure text, there's no images of each step, it just tells wich parts to join.
It's a little confusing in the beggining, but it's easy to get the grasps of this instruction method. Looking foward to share the rest of the building process.

Cheers,
Gregory.

[Tapcho]

This is a nice model. I'll follow your build. Thanks for reminding about Secandas great collection of models, it's a collection worth visiting.

Tappi

[gregoy]

Finished yesterday during midnight construction phases 2 and 3. Currently working on the bell tower, the 4º phase; although the assembly here is tricky, everything is going well, without any hassle.

Cheers,
Gregory.

[gregoy]

Although I managed to finish phases 4 and 5, I ran into a problem when doing phase 6. See those small round roofs? The instructions say to adjust the roof top (piece 6C) and the roof base (piece 6B) that were already joined before gluing it over the wall (piece 8D), but the roof wasn't fitting in the correct place and when I was dry fitting, it was easy to see that it would invade the gluing area of the other parts. after 2 tries of the 2 roofs, I though of something: What if I printed the roof pieces on 90% scale? I printed them, cut, glued and them I tested and it worked!! I don't know if this was intended or if was a design error, but I'm glad that I managed to solve this problem.
Besides that, I would like to give an tip regarding the piece that goes on the top of the roof. The piece is glued on itself, thus the borders of the final shape doesn't have enough area to be glued properly. Knowing this already, I did an easy workaround: I cut the piece around and also in the middle,where I would fold. Then I glued each half over another layer of the same paper I'm using, and after they dried, I cut them again and glued the halves together. This created an much larger area on the borders, and I glued those pieces successfully on the roofs. The next step would be to build 106 modillions, wich are scattered around this part I finished under the roof tips, gables,and also under the spire. But I decided to keep as a the last step, as there many more of this pieces on the rest of the model, and it would take a long time to finish. Later today I'll be starting the choir.

Cheers,
Gregory.

[gregoy]

Sorry for the lack of updates, but here we go: Last thursday, I started and finished the choir, everything went smoothly, without problems. I will show the other sections I've already finished in separate replies so I can give insights on the building of each stage so you guys can avoid problems if you decide to do this model.

Cheers,
Gregory.

[gregoy]

The next section was the 'chevet', wich covers phases 12 to 16, the only issue that I faced is that when I reached the part when I needed to glue the 3 smaller roofs onto the walls, the numbering in the instructions was wrong. The piece numbers I had were 12b and 12c (3 of each) while on the instructions was written 11b and 11c, although I easily spotted the mistake and continued the building. Gladly, this happened only once so far.

[gregoy]

The Nave(Nef) took me a while, because there was a reasonable amount of cutouts on parts of this section, wich covered phases 18 to 21 except phase 22 wich I skipped because it envolved joining the nave to the transept and adding the staircase roof over the nave roof tip, because when gluing the modellions, small parts that goes below many roof borders on the kit, I would like to work on each section alone so I don't break any part that I don't want.

[gregoy]

The Westwerk was interesting to build, as it has an recessed door and a real staircase. Although the towers are completely flat, without detailing; when looking at them from the distance; the way that the texture is made gave an great illusion of the interior of the towers and it almost looks that we have actual columms and bells. It covered phases 24 to 30.

[gregoy]

One of the last things remaining to do was the base. It covers phases 31 to 38 but I didn't finished all of them as the very last couple of phases happens after I join all the sections together onto the base.

Right now I'm doing the modillions, and there are 234 of them. Since the default tickness of an 180gsm are not enough to provide a good contact area for the gluing, even if I just folded the pieces in half and glued them to themselves. So instead, I'm doing this: cutting the halves, gluing them over another sheet; and when the glue is dry, cutting them again, and them joining the halves toghether. This leads to an 4 layer piece, wich is way more than enough to hold the gluing without falling easily. Will update the thread as soon I finish everything.

Cheers,
Gregory

[Tapcho]

This is going to be great. Good work gregoy.

Tappi