As seen in the 2011 On30 Annual

Scratchbuilt speeder Shed in O scale

By Bob Bouderau /photos by the author

I was out of the hobby for more than 20 years, and when I got back into modeling one of the neat kits I assembled was an HO scale speeder shed by Durango Press. It had full interior framing, roof trusses and board-by-board siding. It was a very neat little project, and I often posed some of my speeders and handcars with it in my photos.

I developed a way of getting extremely close to my models with my film camera, using a homemade pinhole aperture in a wide angle manual lens. In photography, the smaller the lens opening (f-stop), the greater depth of field. Normal lenses at the time stopped down to f/16, some to f/22, but my pinhole was around f/96 or so, extremely small! I could photograph model subjects almost touching the lens and still be in acceptable focus. I had great success photographing the insides of some relatively large HO structures I scratchbuilt, and decided to see what I could do with the diminutive speeder shed – it measures all of 1-3/4” deep and 2-1/2” wide. I added some interior details and made a part of the rear wall removable so I could place the pinhole aperture equipped lens right up to the opening.

Now that I’m concentrating mostly on On30, I thought it would be neat to duplicate the speeder shed in O scale and see what photos I could take of its interior using my current digital SLR camera. I measured the HO scale model and converted the dimensions to O scale, which is about twice as large (1:87 to 1:48). I drew full-sized O scale plans with a small CAD program on my computer and printed them off to use as templates for the model.