Growing up in the suburbs of south western Sydney, I remember it was dotted with rows and rows of fibro houses. These were sitting on a quatter acre block representing the Australian dream. I wanted to model this but found many Australian model houses were based on country prototypes and did represent the L shape floor plan fibro houses I remember.
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| Above: The completed fibro house in its natural setting in the western suburbs of Sydney
Research
I bought a book a couple of years ago called Fibro Frontier this was fascinating reading of the humble fibro house. I also did a bit of research found various pictures of the quaint fibro houses. A company that was found making fibro houses was Vandyke brothers who had a factory in Punchbowl in the 1940s and 1950s. I was able to source a product brochure from the Caroline Simpson l.ibrary which also provided details of various variations of the L shape fibro for me to base a model.
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| Above: Vandyke Brothers Product Brochure extract |
The model build
After a search I only found one kit that would be suitable this was a cardboard kit found on Ebay.
The kit was easy to build with the garage the most enjoyable. I decided to reinforce the walls with balsa wood and foam board and substitute the cardboard tile roof with a plastic roof tiles from Kibri.
Once I built the model I was disappointed that the house was overscalled and appeared to be scaled as 1/76 OO gauge instead of 1/87.
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Above: Kit open and ready to build
Scaling down
In order to scale it down i had to trim the floor and walls about one third. I also shrank the floorprint by about one third. Additional details such as porch, guttering and scenery were put in place to make the scene.
Below you can see the difference in scale of the garage against a Hanovale made 1/87 garage.
