By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Evan Thornton helps his father with the family’s residential and commercial construction business. Evan is also an avid collector of farm toys. So it comes as little surprise that Evan has the talent to create small farm structures to scale and sell those creations to collectors.

“I discovered that a lot of the farm toy collectors enjoy having life-like structures to go along with their tractors, combines and their other collectibles so I immediately got busy,” Evan said. “The first few I made looked OK, but they weren’t to scale. That’s when I started using Auto-CAD. After that, I took my creations to a show and people told me they looked great. I slowly progressed to getting the detail down to what they really looked like in real life.”

Evan took drafting classes for four years in high school. While at the Wooster branch of Ohio State University, he studied crop production and took two CAD-CAM courses. The CAD (computer-aided design) courses came in handy with his small-scale creations. He’s been at this tedious hobby the past six years.

“While creating these farm structure replicas I put my computer with the CAD program next to my workbench,” Evan said, “this way I can measure everything and make sure things are to scale.”

At his father’s construction company, he uses actual air hammers, electric saws and power drills. In creating his 1/64-scale farm structures his small tool box contains a multitude of X-acto knives. Quick-drying adhesive, magnifying glasses, wire cutters, bright lights and paint are also key tools to his hobby.

“A lot of my creations are made from balsa wood, but I normally use bass wood because it’s much more durable,” Evan said.
Most metal structures, like fencing and gates, are made with fine copper wire.

His creations include warehouses, truck stops, barns, storage bins, cattle barns and more. His priciest item is a $150 barn that took him 20 hours to create. Some of his creations, like a double-eight herringbone milking parlor, took him 40 hours to create.
“For the time I put into this hobby I don’t make that much money per hour, but I still enjoy doing it,” he said.

Like other collectors of farm toys, Evan either trades at shows or purchases farm toys from Ertl Toys, the most popular manufacturer of die-cast farm toy collectibles.

“I have a lot of 1/64-scale tractors and I wanted barns that looked as good as the toys did,” says Evan, who is 22. “The Ertl barns just didn’t cut it so I decided to start making my own.”

Evan displays his creations at farm toy shows across the state and hopes his creations will interest the model railroad enthusiasts as well.

“The CAD-CAM classes I took really helped, but it also helped that I had grandparents who lived on a farm and that I worked on that farm,” Evan said.