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Chapel Will
Return to
Lombard Lilac Parade in 2017
The Maple Street Chapel will be featured in the Lilac
Parade
Sunday May 21st, beginning 1:30.
Built in 2010, the model
is in 1/12-size (1"=1') scale, making the
overall size 8' long, and 11' high at the steeple.
It
must be able to be stored, so it was constructed in
panels which can be assembled and disassembled.
For durability in all weather, it was constructed of
fiberglass-embossed plywood panels, designed to be
used
in the construction of recreational vehicles.
Here
are the two side walls - the west side and the
east side:
Here
are pictures of the initial assembly of the side
walls and the end walls:
Here
is a picture of the front with the big spire's main
body, the "slopey part", and the belfry:
It doesn't look like much at this point in the
construction, but the steeple is made of styrofoam. A
cone was available to do
the top 24". The rest had to
be shaped out of cubes:
Here is the front with the above unshaped styrofoam
cubes:
Because of its size, the steeple, in spite of being made
of styrofoam, weighs five pounds. Being 1" thick at the
top, it means if you pick it up by the top it will break
right off. Carrying it around, if you just bump a
doorway as you pass through, that will break it. The
technique used to strengthen it was to string nylon
fishing line all around it, then paint it with a resin -
the kind they show on a piece of wood and say it is the
equivalent of 50 coats of varnish. The fishing line was
embedded in the resin. It was then painted black, and
finally, 1/8" x 1/8" strips of balsa wood were glued to it
to form the eight white lines running up and down:
The roof was constructed of the same
fiberglass-embossed plywood was the walls and
painted black:
These two pieces - main
building and steeple -
continued to be built in separate locations, because
the two together amounted to a size too large to be
accommodated in a house. The entire model did not
get assembled until the day before the parade:
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