1950s tract house

This year has been particularly bad for starting projects and then setting them aside for 'later'. I'm hoping I can finish all of them off over the next few weeks - yes, famous last words :-) This is the easiest, so I figured I'd start with it.

I bought this little 1950s style house from George's Trains resale table back in the early summer. I think it was $5. 

It wasn't glued together that well, had some sinking as you can see in the photo, and some blobs of glue got slopped on the outside. 

Even though there were also big blobs of hardened glue on the inside, the corners still had gaps.So, I pried it apart as much as I could in order to glue things back together a little more squarer. Unfortunately, I broke a couple of wall corners in the process and had to do a little remedial work on the walls. So, after a general cleanup with with files and sanding sticks to smooth the outside walls, get rid of glue blobs and clear off the stubs from plastic frets, it glued back together reasonably well.

I added a wall between the garage and the main house so if I pose the garage door in the open position, it won't look too odd inside. Also, I glued some clear plastic windows in the frames. 

The walls were sprayed with Krylon flat white, and the doors and awnings were brush painted with some flat yellow acrylic paint. The chimney was brush painted with a suitable brick red, and a fine brush was used to dab on some white mortar lines. The roof shingles are a mix of grays and black.

An inside wall surface is embossed with 'Plastiville USA' - obviously indicating that it's from the Bachmann series by that name - and that it was patented on 'June, 17, 1952'. After this minor reno, it's not looking too bad after all those years.

Kibri 9922

I paid too much for this re-sale kit, but for some reason it grabbed my attention and I couldn’t just walk on by. It did turn out to be fun to build, and after a light spray of Krylon Fusion nickel-silver paint, it doesn’t look too bad. I think it’ll become some sort of public art work along Ocean Boulevard.

Kibri is one of those names that resonates in my brain every time I see it. Way back when I was probably around 5 or 6, I recall I had a small, modern apartment building kit that I built with my father. The memory is cloudy: all I remember is the box was labeled Kibri, the kit was a modern building and I liked it. Any time I stumble across old Kibri kits of modern buildings I look them over closely to see if any sort of memory will be triggered. No luck so far.

The Elgin gets updated

Signs, shrubs and some interior detailing were added - along with some no parking signs out back :-)

The interior details are only temporary so a variety of scenes can be staged. They're held in place with some slightly congealed rubber cement. 

Looks like someone should pressure-wash that side wall to clean it up a bit. 

The back wall needs some clean-up too.

After hours

I’ve been on the E. L. Moore journey for awhile – since last August actually. Well, I’ve had an interest in his work since I was a boy in the ‘70s, but I didn’t take a deep dive into it until rather recently. It’s turning out to be a little more than just a happy jaunt down memory lane and having a look at all the sights along the way. Some of it has challenged my notions of what I’m doing as a hobbyist. Although I’ve spent a lot of effort being –as a friend of mine put it – an “E. L. Moore completist” collecting and reading all the articles he wrote, the more I read, and study his photos, the more I’ve come to understand that wasn’t all there was to this. For one, I like making scale buildings, but looking at them, I realize they’re often merely shells. Mr. Moore understood what a building is: a place that people use, where things happen. Just about all his projects make that abundantly clear in the way people and things are used and positioned. Shells devoid of life are pretty rare in his world; pretty common in mine. I’ve been looking at a few of my layout’s building shells and thought I’d try and get the stories out of a few of them that I had imagined them telling but never did anything about. I figured I’d start with one of my favourites: I really like the corner window of the ‘building-in-a-bag’ so I began with it, adding ornaments and things over a period of several weeks when I had some time. Hopefully I can post some more pictures of it over the next few days, and get going on improving other buildings on my layout.

‘Fluorescent’ lighting for the Elgin

[The roof fit needs a little tuning]

I’ve been fiddling with the Elgin build this week while I’ve been waiting for the new drill bits and fibre optics for the Mel’s Drive-in project to arrive in the mail. Also, it’s been gosh darn hot – well, hot for here – with daytime temperatures in the low 30s and humidex in the low 40s, some evening model building in the cool of the basement goes down rather well these days.

[Compared to the WSMoftheWBB the Elgin is pretty small]

When I started the project I didn’t plan to put lights in, just clean it up a bit, but while rummaging through my left over optical fibres trying to figure out what I’d need for Mel’s, it dawned on me that some simulated fluorescent lighting by way of side illuminating optical fibre might look alright in this little building. It looked like it was going to be relatively easy to install, and I had enough parts left over from other projects so I didn’t have to buy anything new; I decided to give it a go. 

The lights are made from 3mm diameter side illuminating optical fibre. The 'fixture' part of the light is simply a U-section styrene tube.

Surprisingly, it isn't easy to find a glue that will bond the optical fibre to the styrene fixture. Eventually, I found that this Hercules double-sided tape did the trick. 

Here's an end view of the fibre. I painted the end that dead-ends against the glass wall frame with silver coloured paint.

Here's the lights after installation. What got me started thinking about this sort of lighting were some recesses in the short glass wall. The assembled lights fit neatly into them.

I bought a couple of these LED closet lights at the dollar store down at the mall when I was trying to figure out how to light up the fibres in the WSMoftheWBB build. They didn't get used on that project, but one of them was useful on this one. Note to self, even though it's called a 'dollar' store, these things cost $2.

This is what it looks like after the cover and reflectors were pried off. The optical fibres aren't too flexible, so I cut those yellow power wires from the batteries and soldered in some longer pieces so I could get the LEDs close to the fibres without too much undue fibre bending. I also cut out the on-off switch from the circuit board to replace it with a slide switch that could be more conveniently placed in the structure.

Here's the light after the re-wiring. As you can see I also cut off the outer housing to allow the unit to fit into the building better.

A piece of sheet styrene was glued to the bottom of the light unit so I could insert it securely between the walls of the secondary structure. 

A hole had to be cut in the sheet in order to replace the batteries at some future date.

So, here's the lighting unit installed in the secondary structure. The on-off switch was taped to the floor in a convenient location.

The optical fibres were trimmed and attached to the LEDs with heat shrink tubes. A hair dryer was used to shrink the tubes.

There was an interior garage door between the main showroom and the secondary structure. I cut it out and replaced it with a photo of a room printed on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. The third LED, and the residual light from the optical fibres, backlights the paper and helps reinforce the illusion of a detailed room in the secondary structure.

I still need to add some signs and details, but I'm going to park this one for awhile and work on Mel's.

The ‘Building in a Bag’ becomes The Elgin Restaurant

[The walls were temporarily leaned together to see how things will look.]

Although simple and toy-like, this is a rather charming kit. I started by making new pieces for the long sidewall and the small back wall. Each new wall is made from two pieces of styrene cut and glued together: the outer piece is 0.020 inch sheet with an embossed stucco pattern, and the inner piece is regular 0.030 inch sheet. 

[These are the walls that were replaced.]

[There's a gap between the stone wall and the main section window frames that will need a sliver of thin styrene sheet to fill.]

Prior to an initial spray of colour, all the walls were washed in warm soapy water and sanded a bit to remove any remaining sprue burrs. Many low-cost toy-like structures can be improved considerably just by giving them a more nuanced paint job, and I’m hoping that will help out this little building. Things are looking promising and even painting the once light blue window walls have made it clear that they have rather nice shapes and detail.

Building in a bag

Back in the winter I bought this bag of building parts at a swap meet. The seller assured me all the parts were included. For some reason I believed him and plopped down $4. It turns out he wasn’t lying and all the pieces were present, which is good because I wanted to believe him since it looked like from the parts on view, it might be a rather nice kit of a mid 20^th century style building. As it turns out, it is. It’s a Plastiville HO scale, ‘50s or ‘60s style car dealership. Overall, it’s rather toy-like, but it has a nice front façade and signage. I think with a little work it could be turned into a passable model; maybe a restaurant or diner. Located nearby a convenient streetcar stop of course :-)

Finished renovations at the Post Office

I haven’t tried to restore a broken down kit before, so this was an interesting project for me. I wasn’t able to do as much repair as I had originally intended because some pieces had so much glue blobbed on them by the original builder they couldn’t be disassembled without breaking. So, I had to live with some wonky, unrestored sections. In the end, the restoration won’t win any prizes, but it didn’t turn out too bad, and fits in well in the city section of the LOL.

[Front facade before renovations - looks like the police kicked in the door :-) ]

I didn’t want to change the overall look of the building because that’s what attracted me to it in the first place. So, the intent of this project was just to clean it up and fix problems.

The first task was to carefully pry apart what I could, and wash all the pieces in some warm water with mild dish soap. Afterward drying, all the pieces were sanded and filed and smoothed to remove any rough edges, molding marks, or flash. The large front window, main entry doors, and about half the window glazing were beyond repair and had to be scrapped. 

[The back wall before renovations.]

Once all the pieces were cleaned up, it then became a matter of doing a little touch-up painting where possible, gluing them back together in a squarer configuration, and rebuilding some missing or broken pieces. The finished building is still a bit out of kilter and the roof doesn’t sit quite right because not all the pieces could be disassembled.

[Here's the 'burned-out' back staircase]

Rebuilding the back staircase and its window wall was the biggest reconstruction job. In its model life this building must have been a crack-house where the owners engaged in a fierce firefight with local police :-) although in its real life the reasons for its burned out back stairwell were probably less dramatic: I suspect kids tried to blow it up with firecrackers. The stairwell itself was unrepairable, so I simply painted it flat black. One of the stairwell sidewalls was missing so I built a new one from styrene pieces using the remaining one as a template. The stairwell’s exterior facing wall was cut from some clear plastic that had an embossed block pattern. I tried to paint a few blocks free-hand to add to the sixties feel of the place, but I thought too highly of my skills, and the result is rather shaky :-(

[This is the new staircase wall before painting.]

The front wall needed new main doors and an overhead window. The doors are cut from 0.010 inch styrene and bonded to a piece of clear plastic that forms both the door glass and the overhead window. The door handles are thin slivers of 0.010 inch styrene bent to shape. The finished door unit isn’t too bad, but doesn’t have a lot of relief. One day I’ll get the hang of making these types of doors. I suspect one of those 3-D printers might be rather good at making these things.

[Here's the new wall installed.]

The base was more or less completely cut away so that only the foundation was left. On the front wall I then added a large lower step to the exterior entry staircase. It’s cut from 0.060 inch styrene. On the back wall I built some planters up against the facade and added a few steps up to the office door.

The building was finished up by painting the roof, replacing some missing window glazing, and then gluing on the roof. 

[The old front door and the new one before sanding and painting.]

Bingo: a somewhat worn, sixties-esque building that’s still providing work-a-day service of the streets of the LOL. It won’t be a post office in its new incarnation; maybe an acupuncturist’s clinic.  That reminds me,

An acupuncturist and a porcupine walk into a bar. They sit down together, and after a couple of drinks the acupuncturist leans over to the porcupine and says, “Buddy, you know the needles are supposed to go into the patient?”

Ok. Well, as Debra has often told me, I shouldn’t give up my day job for the comedy club circuit anytime soon!

Reno job #1: The Post Office

I was at George's Trains a couple of weeks ago and saw this Post Office in the resale section. I liked the size, proportions and colour, so I bought it. It wasn't glued together very well - which will be to my benefit when I take it apart - and has a couple of pieces missing, but I think it will be a fine building after it's renovated. However, the updated version probably won't be a Post Office. Not too sure what it'll be just yet.

The Post Office has a simulated glass block window wall over its main entrance. I thought I'd tune it up a bit and colour some of those blocks much like the above wall section that belongs to a church - built in 1961 - that is down the street from my house. For now, the Post Office is residing on my workbench awaiting disassembly.