While exhibiting the Woodthorpe Model Railway club's 'Woodthorpe Shed' MPD layout at the Great Central Railway modelling event in June 2015, I came across a new manufacturer of 7mm scale buildings called LCUT (www.lcut.co.uk). This company may be familiar to the 4mm fraternity but they are now starting to make some of their models available in the senior scale. The kits are made from laser cut cardboard. They use a CAD/CAM software package to create a design in a similar way to the manufacture of an etched kit, but the resultant parts are cut from a piece of cardboard using a laser to separate the part from the waste. They also appear to use a less powerful technique to half cut (in the same style as a brass kit 'half etch') to mark detail onto the surface of the card.

The models they had on the exhibition stand made me consider building one of their smaller kits, of something like a lineside hut, but at the time they did not have such a kit available. They could supply various railway arches in brick, a relatively small low relief lineside warehouse (with optional brick built huts), and an engine shed. After walking away and considering the quality of what I had seen on the stand, I decided to bite the bullet and bought an Engine Shed kit, product code LCC B 70-01, as shown in the manufacturer’s photo above.

On opening the box at home, I was not disappointed over the quality of the laser cut card in the box. Many of the individual parts are attached to sprues as found in a plastic kit, and all components are marked with a code, either directly, or with a code on a tab, which matches a contents list included in the instructions. Some of the tabs which are attached directly to the parts, are 'half cut' to aid their removal, but not all. Perhaps it would be possible for ALL the component identification tabs that are attached to a component, to be 'half cut' to assist in their removal. (See Figure 1). Figure 1

The parts are cut from sheets of card of different thicknesses that appear to be appropriate to the part. There is an issue with the contents list as some of the counts are not entirely accurate. Parts 74-02, 74-03, and 74-12 come in left and right hand ‘a’ and ‘b’ versions, and three lots of 74-16 and 74-17, roof vents, are provided, not two, as shown in the manufacturer’s picture of the completed model.

I have to say that I was a little surprised at the brevity of the instructions but the basic requirements of 'what goes where' are covered by the double-sided piece of A5 paper. There is also an instruction manual available on the web to assist the builder, this runs to 130 A5 pages. Some pages of the manual appear to be the 4mm scale kits but, again, they do point the user in the correct direction.

Being part of Woodthorpe Model Railway Club in Nottingham, I have spent much time talking to our resident cardboard expert, known as Cardboard John to most people. He builds 7mm locos from cardboard sheet, but he will also reply when called Mr. Fownes. His general rule is to use a waterproof PVA wood glue to attach cardboard parts together, but as I would normally use a Polyurethane wood glue when building something from wood, I wanted to start this build by testing this against some of my collection of PVA and wood glues, using off-cuts of the LCUT cardboard supplied, in an attempt to identify the best adhesive to use for this project.

The adhesives used were Windsor and Newton Artists Matt Medium, (both neat and mixed 50/50 with isopropyl alcohol - IPA), a generic waterproof PVA craft glue, a generic waterproof wood glue, Titebond wood glue, Gorilla polyurethane glue, Deluxe aliphatic resin and Anita's Tacky Glue. The Artists’ Matt Medium may be a strange choice, but I read about this 'glue' in a Gordon Gravett article concerning ballast laying (as a replacement for PVA), and I have successfully used it for both ballast and setting real coal into a bunker. It is sold as an acrylic art paint medium but it sets solid and it has a real advantage in that it doesn't affect the colour of the object being glued, so your ballast doesn't go slightly darker, nor acquire that slight green tinge as it does with PVA. In the testing, the parts were 'butt' glued together and left for 24 hours before being tested to destruction. (See Figure 2). Figure 2

The results were similar to the results I expected. While the Artists Matt Medium (with 50% IPA mix) proved to be totally ineffective with the two pieces of cardboard just falling apart upon handling (I believe this was due to the solution being absorbed by the cardboard before a bond could be made), all the others, including the neat version of the Artists’ Matt Medium, created a bond that was strong enough to allow the top layer of the cardboard to be ripped from its lower levels. I then tried to remove the glue together with that top layer from the second piece of cardboard and they were all similar in strength. The Artists’ Matt Medium appeared to be the weakest, and the Gorilla polyurethane glue appeared to be the strongest bond, but it was also the most difficult to work with as it was stringy (like a contact adhesive) and it also expands on setting, producing a small, but noticeable, bump around the bond which would be visible on a finished model.

From this (not) very scientific testing I concluded that waterproof PVA wood glues are a suitable adhesive for constructing this kit with no further comment required.

The LCUT on-line manual suggests that these kits should be started with the corners first, but from experience of building Ian Kirk Coach kits and putting 'Linka' parts together, I decided to put the two longer walls together first, on a flat surface, and then attach the walls to the ends.

After identifying the parts for the walls and ends I started to prepare them for assembly. There's no flash to remove from these laser cut components, and there was nothing that required tidying, but the larger parts have identification tags attached directly to the component which need to be removed (whereas the smaller parts have their numbers on the sprues). Some of these tags are already half separated from the component as they have been cut along the side of the component to the same depth as the bricks. Page 14 of the online manual suggests the use of a ruler when removing these ID tags, but I would go one step further and say that a ruler is mandatory, and cut from the back.

Figure 3 shows the damage I caused by a ham-fisted attempt to remove the tag from the front without a ruler using the laser cut line as a guide for my scalpel. Figure 3

The lighter coloured patches you can see along the diagonal edge are where the top layer of the cardboard brick has come away from it's backing as a consequence of forcing a scalpel blade between the edge of the part and the tag, causing the cardboard to bulge and the top layer to separate (this damage will be concealed by another part later in the build).

Figure 4 shows the results when cutting from the back. The flat surface of the cutting mat has provided protection to the finish and as you do not need to cut all the way to the outside surface the bricks are further protected from damage. Figure 4

When putting the parts together, the online manual has a very useful suggestion. If there is any resistance to putting the components together, use a ruler against the ends of the exposed bricks to spread the load and avoid damage to an individual brick. This should be done face down again to help the alignment of the parts. Once in place, the manual suggests painting the adhesive on the back and (therefore) relying on capillary action to pull some of the glue into the small gap between the bricks. Personally, I preferred to make sure that some glue was present on the ends of the bricks when assembling and I used the technique shown in Figure 5 to dip the ends of the bricks into the glue, dipping both parts of the assembly before gently pushing the components together on a flat surface. I placed a small amount of glue in a straight line on a scrap piece of cardboard and dipped the back of the exposed bricks into the adhesive, using a shallow angle, to keep the glue away from the front surface. Figure 5

When the items were pushed together there was a small amount of excess that came from the joint, but, for this kit, all the main wall assembly points will be covered by other components later in the build. I cleaned up the front and back of the joints with a brush dampened in IPA to assist in cleaning the brush.

It was only after I assembled the ends and sides to create a box, that I considered the eventual finish of the shed, and whether I should have distressed the brickwork while the components were still flat on the workbench, but too late now.

To produce weathered and distressed brickwork, as the components are made from cardboard and the bricks are half cut to provide the mortar lines, I decided to use the tip of a scalpel and a pair of tweezers to remove the top layer from some of the bricks. I practised this technique on areas of brickwork which will be covered by separate components on the finished model, before moving to the exposed areas. To stop the cardboard from 'feathering' I used my 50 per cent Matt Medium and IPA mixture to seal the surface that was exposed by the removal of the outer layer of the brick.

The question you need to ask yourself is how many bricks would be distressed on your building? After looking up Victorian brickwork on the internet, I can say that the general opinion is that the bricks used in the late Victorian age were of much better quality than bricks used at the start of the railway age, so brickwork from around 1890 would have far fewer defaced and degraded bricks than buildings constructed during the 1840s.

The layout I intend to plant this shed into is fictional and based on a location which acquired its railway towards the end of the 19th century, and the layout is to be dressed as if in the mid 1960s, so the shed would be about 70 years old. After looking at pictures of buildings from around that time, I decided to remove the face of just one brick per smaller part, and two or three from the larger parts. If you are building a preserved railway based on a location built during the great railway building age, then your building may be 170 years old and would therefore have been built of inferior bricks, and seen many more winters and summers than mine, but also bear in mind that I managed to remove the odd brick face by accident from the edges of the parts when handling the assemblies.

The next stage is to decorate the basic structure with the outer brick courses/facings. This is one aspect of the build that is covered in the instructions as the order of the parts is very important when assembling the components. The manufacturer has marked these parts with a number (74-11), together with ‘a’ and ‘b’ versions, and ‘Top’ and ‘Bottom’ versions, I marked these components ‘Ta,’ ‘Tb,’ ‘Ba,’ and ‘Bb,’ in pen, on the back of the components before cutting them from the sprue, but if you have failed to do this before removing them from the sprue then the ‘trick’ is that the outer ends of the top and bottom courses should have the smaller bricks projecting from the ends, and they should match the smaller bricks of the vertical versions of the outer brick courses /facings on the ends. All the parts have continued to be exact in their sizes with no issues requiring the parts to be modified to fit.

The doors come as eight separate components (four doors and 4 strapping - see manufacturers photo and Figures 6 and 7), making doors with detail on both sides, resulting in two main doors with an ‘occasional’/access door, and two main doors without. Figure 6

The instructions speak of folding these door sheets in half but I deviated from the instructions as I noticed that when the assemblies for the doors were placed back to back they were mirror images of each other, so I glued the main door parts back-to-back to each other and then glued the strapping to these assemblies. Figure 7

I separated the completed doors from each other after leaving them to dry under a weight, to ensure they were flat. There is no representation of door ironmongery, or hinges, supplied in the kit and there is also no representation of the wooden blocks / supports for the access door hinges, so you may wish to consider this before finalising the assemblies for the doors.

The roof is supplied as a set of four flat parts where the slates/tiles have been 'half lasered' into the cardboard. It is a fair representation but the result is a flat roof. I prefer roofs that show slates or tiles with depth, and in the real world, cheaper specification slates can be as much as 10mm thick and this represents 0.23mm / 0.01in / 10 thou in 7mm scale. In my view, this depth should be visible on my models. I searched the internet looking for information with the result that I feel that an average large slate used by the railway companies at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, could be either 20 x 10in or 24 x 12in. I used MS Word to create a computer drawing of slates to the size of 22 x 11in. I chose this size only because the Alignment Grid used in MS Word was a round number at 0.05in, which is close to representing a scale two inches, although you could use 0.07 to represent three 3 inches if you prefer. This was printed on to 250 gram card from an art shop. I always remember someone saying that for compacted heavy card, the kilograms per square metre is a good approximation to its depth/thickness in millimetres, which would be about 0.25mm. The card was - laboriously - cut out and laid on the roof assemblies in strips in the same manner as described in other articles, which I will not repeat here. I also added some thin vertical strips of card to the flat roof component before adding the tiles, so that the resultant slate roof would have a slight sagging effect between the supports in the main structure (See Figure 8). Figure 8

To say that cutting the tiles is laborious is understating the tedious nature of cutting tiles for laying on a roof in this way. It dawned on me while producing the Word document / drawing that the manufacturer is missing a trick here. The cutting of slates or roof tiles for laying on the roof of the model should be something that a laser could do much quicker and more accurately than the modeller and if the manufacturer does not want to supply sheets of ready cut tiles for putting in the box with a kit, then perhaps they could offer packs of ready cut tiles as an option.

The roof vents are attached to the roof in the same manner as the rest of the kit is built, and I would suggest that you consider adding lead flashings to the joins between the vents and the slates. This can be done with filler, thin card/paper strips, or you could use a thin very flexible metal. Guttering is not supplied. I have to admit that this is where my build has stopped (See Figures 9 and 10). Figure 9

I'm adding more detail to the doors and roof, adding guttering, and as there is no representation of brickwork on the inside of the shed, I am considering what to do with the interior (Probably Slaters Plastikard brickwork painted cream and weathered bricks to alter the visible colour) Figure 10

When it comes to painting my shed, I have looked on the web and asked our club member ‘Cardboard John’ Fownes, and the general advice is that cardboard takes paint very well but the first coat is often soaked by up the cardboard and disappears quite rapidly. On that basis the advice is to use normal paint consistency, and do not use too much paint on the first application. The cardboard will absorb a thin paint and physically expand, while a thick paint may not be absorbed to the same degree, but it will obscure some of the details and make it more difficult to highlight the mortar lines in the final model.

There are two methods which could be used to enable the mortar to be visible, either use a base coat of a mortar colour, then pick out some of the bricks in various shades of the target brickwork colour, and finally drybrush the main colour as the last step, or you could use a watercolour pencil (used on its side as opposed to the point). A second method could be to start with picking out the individual bricks, followed by painting with the main brickwork colour (using your preferred method for slowly building up the colour which enables the picked out bricks to alter the visible colour) and then add your mortar colour by running a thin wash of your chosen mortar colour into the mortar lines, and then removing some of the excess. Either way, any distressed bricks will need to be fixed before weathering as both methods may leave the distressed bricks as mortar colour. The processing for weathering is available from other articles and will not be repeated here, but remember that water will always fall downwards, and will take most types of dirt with it, so mainly consider where the water will run off the building and that's where you need to put the dirt.

To sum up, I would say that I am happy with this kit, the parts all fitted together very accurately and the result looks like a branch line single road engine shed. I have no relationship with this manufacturer other than as a customer, and I would be happy to buy another of their kits.

A copy of this review was sent to LCUT and Jacub Stachula responded:

Thank you for sending me the review. This is the most professional and in depth review we have received to date. It was a pleasure to read! The only comments I can add are:

1. We are working on improving our manuals.
   An example of that can be found in the B 2070-04 manual: http://lcut.co.uk/doc/instructions/B%2070-04.pdf
2. The general manual is outdated and still contains the old style parts with solid fixtures.
   It was made back in the day when we had 2-3 bundles and badly needs an update.
3. The material we use is food fibre board not cardboard.
   It is comparable to MDF but softer. It is made from 100 per cent wood fibre board with two leaves of paper on both sides. Also it is conservation grade so it can withstand much more diverse environmental conditions than cardboard.
4. We have looked at making the roof tiles more realistic.
   The problem with cutting individual tiles is that they would fly off from the cutting bed. The laser cutter utilities an air jet to cool down the material (otherwise it would catch fire). We are however thinking about long strips of partially cut tiles which would look nearly identical to individually applied tiles or slates.

Best regards, Jakub Stachula,
LCUT Creative