It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 6 Final: Adding Details

This is the final installment for both the Kellogg's Fire House from Engine House project as well as our look at small fire engines. I'll have a couple more posts concerning small vehicles in general and that will wrap up the series on small vehicles in general. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

This final post shows some of the extra details I added to the roof as well as the placement of the HVAC unit in a different spot on the roof.

Arrrgh, after assembling the walls, one of the corners split 😤

The two types of brick walls is actually a common feature on buildings in urban areas. Nice, cleanly dressed walls face the public side, scruffy looking walls face the alleys or buildings situated right next to the station. The rougher textured bricks would have been cheaper and thus would have been a cost-cutting factor in the construction.

Scrap railing and ladder material and a horn from an O-gauge diesel engine provide detail on top of the hose drying tower roof

A hatch, a vent and the HVAC complete the detailing

I didn't want a five-bay fire house. The arrangement of the vehicles within a four-bay house as well as allowing room for the alarm center and a small office means I ended up with a 7 3/16" square building.

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 5 The Build: The Roof

The roof is next and is made from the roof scan of the original Kellogg's engine house and cut down to size. The bracing is inset from the edges of the roof enough to allow the frame work to rest just inside of the wall bracing. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 4 The Build: Bracing the Walls

After building the mock-up it was time to head on to the final build. One of the steps I forgot to photograph was assembling the walls, but really it was simple. Each wall has a tab on which glue is applied and used to attach it to the next wall. Take care to keep the walls square and straight and then wait for the glue to dry before applying the bracing.

All of my paper buildings get bracing made from either balsa wood or basswood - whichever I have at the time. My buildings tend to get moved around a lot so the bracing adds much needed strength. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

There's so much void space in the front wall with the doors open, that each door opening needs to be framed, otherwise the whole front wall would bend in.

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 3 The Mock-Up

Remember folks, this is a re-posting of a project which first appeared here on the blog back in 2015. Here's something I normally don't do on those very rare occasions when I actually do build something: making a mock-up. Don't know why I thought this was necessary but I did it anyway. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

The originals

-After scanning the original artwork, I cropped the various elements and saved them as separate .jpeg files. I ended up with separate .jpeg's for each wall, the bay door, the various human entry way doors, a window (all the windows were the same so I created one .jpeg for a whole window, and one .jpeg for a trimmed-down smaller window)

-Then I inserted the .jpeg's into a Word doc which allowed me to adjust the size of things like the doors

-The bay door of the engine house was too large to use as is. It was saved as a separate .jpeg file inserted into the Word doc and reduced in size.

-I printed low-res B&W copies. 

-Here you can see a wall which I had cut out in order to get a comparison between  the fire engine and wall

-The small doors laying loosely on top are copies of the engine house bay door reduced in size

-All four walls and the roof glued together

-You'll notice the bay doors each have a window on them. I cropped out one of the wall windows, then overlaid it over the door

-An HVAC unit and a tower representing the hose drying tower was placed atop the roof

The complete mock-up. The small sign above the double doors reads "Engine Co. No. 7"

I designed three different side walls. Two have varying window arrangements and one is solid brick, with graphics used from a sheet of brick paper that was laying around The Cave. The different brick pattern is not unlike real fire house constructs where-in one type of brick is used on walls facing the street, while cheaper, less attractive brick is used for walls which either butt up against a neighboring building or face into an alley.

-By overlaying window and door graphics on the plain brick wall you end up with a more detailed structure.

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 2 Kellogg's N Scale Engine House

This project was inspired by the insert I bought off of fleaBay many years ago. I believe it may have come with the trucks when you ordered them from Kellogg's. The insert shows a fire station you could have made from a shoebox! It's nice '50s era crafting idea but impractical for my purpose. If I were to use a shoebox it would have needed to be a small one to accommodate those small engines and hey, everyone in this house outgrew small shoes a long time ago! But, as luck would have it, I came across another Kellogg's offering on fleaBay that was perfect for this project: an N-scale brick engine house kit! By scanning the two sheets of the kit on my large format scanner and printing them out on 11"x14" 90lb cardstock, I was able to make my own fire station kit! The next installment will cover the mock-up of the station. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Front and back of the insert

Kellogg's N-scale Engine House

Kellogg's Engine House to Fire House Project Templates!!!

HOOORAY! I've been able to recover the .PDF file for the templates. Here's what happened. Not long before the external hard drive went kaput I had downloaded the file to Google Docs, then when I went back to the docs page I couldn't find it!!! arrrrrrgh@!**#  

So today I went back to Google Docs and played around with the settings (Google re-formatted their screens from the last time I used them and I was a tad lost) and found the file along with several others that were 'lost'. Below is the shared link to the file. Enjoy! Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina

Kellogg's Fire House Template

I hope the template is easy enough to follow and that someone out there is able to do a much better build than me. I'd be interested to see your results.

Kellogg's Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 4

Losing our external hard drive with so many of our photos on it was depressing and quite frankly we haven't felt like blogging much. I'm gonna try to get back in the swing of things though. Eventually I'll probably send the hard drive back to the manufacturer to see if they can repair it, but it's no longer under warranty and the holiday season is too close to have to spend money fixing gadgets. That being said not everything is lost and we'll do what we can in the meantime.

I know I promised there would be templates to go along with this Kellogg's Fire Engine project and while I was able to get the photos downloaded to Google, the .PDF file remains tucked away on the broke hard drive. Sorry. So anyway, here at least are photos of the completed project. Enjoy - I hope. Opa Fritz and Oma Bettina

You'll notice the walls don't go together well at the top. When the top couple rows of bricks were folded down, and the glue tab then folded up there always seems to be a problem joining those corners together. I've had this same problem on other buildings with similar construction techniques and it's been bothering me. I thought it over and have come to realize that further trimming is needed on those portions of the wall that get folded over. I won't be able to re-assemble this building until I recover the .PDF file though 

Going to the scrap box yielded several detail parts to add a little interest to the wide expanse of roof. An o-gauge diesel horjn was place atop the hose drying tower to act as a siren and was surrounded by lengths of HO scale fencing. The tower top is accessed by an HO scale ladder. A small plastic tube is a vent and a piece of cardboard became the access hatch

The building measures about 7 3/16" square. I could have made a wider building with less depth and five bays but this is what I ended up with for better or worse.