I started with my .040” styrene, which I would be using for all the major walls and roofs. Its fairly strong and thick so it would provide extra support once braced properly. The best method to use to cut it was to score and snap the styrene. I started by snapping out all the four walls, the two different roofs (one for the lid one for the interior of the box), and a floor.
I then moved on to cutting out window and door openings. This proved to be harder than I thought and would provide me my first lesson in scratch building. With thick styrene, it is very hard to do interior cuts. You obviously can not score and snap, (or so I thought) so my first attempt was to draw in the windows and slice them out with an xacto knife and small drill. I even experimented with scoring an “x” from corner to corner of the windows to be able to snap them out that way. What I learned is that this method, while could be usable, created a very ragged window hole and turned out to be too big. While I could have used it still, I decided to try again.
The next attempt was to score and snap the entire walls and then piece it all back together. This allowed me better control over the window shapes. The trick is to find common lines to cut on, therefore reducing the number of pieces to put back together and maintaining as much strength in the wall as possible.
This photo shows different states of progress on each wall. The solid square is the front wall scored and snapped out. I have not yet drawn lines for windows or started any cuts on this section. The top right section is a side wall all cut and glued back together. The green stuff is Squadrons green putty used to fill the cut gaps on each side. The top left section is another side wall all finished construction, glued, puttied, and sanded.It did take some time to shape each windows after each section was cut into various bits. I used sand paper, a couple of small metal files, and an xacto knife to smooth and straighten the inside of each window and to make sure everything would fit properly. It takes some practice but I think it should go faster next time.
A close up of one side wall. The quarter and dime are there to show scale. Remember this is an N scale building and those are N Scale windows. The top windows are fairly large for this scale and thats why I chose them. They are the 40 pane engine house windows I ordered from Tichy.
The front wall completed. All detail pieces will be added later so that is why you do not see the columns and things yet.That reminds me of one of the benefits of using Illustrator to create the diagrams. While doors, windows and styrene all come in inch measurements, they tend to be in the thousands of inches. For example, the .040” Styrene is said 4 thousands of an inch. In any case something like a window or door will have an opening measurement of .37” x .57”. This is pretty hard to use accurately on a standard ruler. The nice thing about Illustrator is that you can simply switch the document at anytime to convert all measurements from inches to millimeters and back again. So my windows will become something like 6.8mm x 12.8mm. Much easier to measure than with inches and you can always get the inch measurement also if you know a part is 1/4”.
The back wall completed. This wall has no windows because the loan card holder would be blocking all of this wall from the inside. No sense in adding windows here then and a lot of these type of buildings did very little on walls that were not facing the streets, but I did want to put something there to give it some interest. Since my building only had one door entry in the front, I thought a small back door would be appropriate for money delivery or whatever.
All the walls and the floor laid out. Now to start with interior bracing and get this thing looking like a building.
Here I have completed most of the interior bracing on each section. More might be added into the center of each section to provide more support but I need to wait to install the window glass first, and that only after I have painted the interior. A nice dark color (black in most cases) is suggested to keep the light inside from making your building glow. The shiny mess you see on the bottom right section is light reflecting off the glue. It dries transparent if a bit shiny.One thing I did discover is that this building, with its many huge windows, would show a lot more interior than I had at first anticipated. Although my initial goals were to use opaque window glass so I could avoid interior detail, I am beginning to rethink that now and might attempt some in this building. The floor piece will stay separate until the very last minute so I should have plenty of opportunity to play around with some interior. I will have to do something about the inside of the walls though. Just spraying it all black will look funny, so I am toying with the idea of lining them with magazine clippings or printed paper to look like mahogany or something. I will most likely use this method to lay down a checkerboard or some other detailed flooring, but all this will be addressed later.
In the next post, we should be able to see some progress in getting the building standing up. Stay tuned!
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