April 11 we mentioned that the walls were completed as far as we could go and that we were moving on to windows. We even put a few pictures of them here. We thought there were a lot in the pictures. We were wrong; that was less than half. Today the windows were completed.
Windows - How to Make a Window that Looks Like This
Windows deserve their own special place. Roundhouses like windows. If you build this kit, we will guarantee one thing... by the time you complete the last one, you will not like windows.
Dennis Brennan designed his roundhouse with three sizes of windows. The smallest are in the first floor walls. The mid and large sizes are in the clerestory.
A window is composed of three parts, an exterior an interior sash, both laser cut, and a pain (really spelled pane but you get the idea) that has to be cut from sheets of 6” X 12” clear styrene. It takes several strokes with a sharp exacto knife to cut the styrene.
The construction process is relatively simple:
Locate the sheets that have the laser cut sashes. Note that one side is wood and the other side is paper which covers glue.
Spray paint the wood side. We used Rust-oleum Satin Hunter Green
Remove the individual sashes. We stacked them up, knocked them in the floor, but mainly we grew in amazement as the piles accumulated. Here are some of them:
Get out the clear styrene. Dennis thoughtfully provided pattern sheets showing the size and placement of windows that can be slid under the clear styrene sheet. Then you simply remove the paper from the sash and place the glue side on the clear styrene where the underlying pattern is. The glue holds it in place.
BEWARE The directions mention that the styrene has a plastic covering over one side to protect it from getting scratched. PLACE THE SIDE WITH THE PLASTIC DOWN. IT IS REMOVED LATER. Don’t ask me how I know.
Once the sashes are placed, it is time to start cutting.
Okay, three days have gone by, the sashes with windows are in three piles, small, medium, and large, and the remaining sashes are in three additional piles.
Take one sash/glass side and remove the plastic covering from the pane.
Remove the paper covering the glue from the other sash.
Carefully join the two together, making sure that the edges exactly join up.
Trim any styrene that protrudes from the sash/styrene sandwich.
When finished, you should have 57 smaller windows, 30 medium windows, and 18 large windows... 105 in all and each has been handled at least ten times. You will be a qualified expert in roundhouse window making.
You have a bucket filled with completed windows, right. Well, not exactly. Here are half of them:
There is a reward when you have completed the windows. They snap into the walls easily. Only two had to be trimmed to size.
And they do make the side walls look good.
We completed 2 more pages of instructions
Next... the Clerestory