Scratch-building Another Skyscraper

This is my second 'high rise' or 'skyscraper' scratch-building attempt in N Scale. I actually started this one about the same time as the 17-Story "Godzilla Corporation" building, but have not yet gotten around to completing it.

The motivation for this building came from the desire to have a modern-looking skyscraper with the common 'mirrored' glass windows so common on modern buildings.

While I used some similar methods for this building as I did with "Godzilla", the materials are significantly different. First, this building started off as fairly standard clear acrylic sheets (about an 1/8" thick), rather than 1/2" thick 'smoked acrylic' as used on the first building.

The second major difference is that I used window film (typically used to darken car windows) with a 'mirror' appearance to get the affect I was looking for.

Again, I used a straight-edge and an Xacto knife to score the acrylic to simulate window and other surface seams. As opposed to my other building, the scoring on this building is vertical.  I also played around with the idea of using very thin strips of painted styrene for the vertical separations. You can see what this looks like compared to a building face without the strips in the below photo.  I wasn't really that taken with the styrene strips versus just the scoring, so I did not use this approach.

 
To create the impressions of floors in this building, I masked out the actual 'window' areas' and then painted the non-window flooring areas.

My measurements for these areas are:

• Floor to Ceiling: 18mm or approximately 3/4"
• Window area: 13mm or approximately 1/2" (which, by fortune, is also the width of the masking tape I used)
• Floor/non window area: 5mm or about 1/4"

To provide some contrast and hopefully some interest, I seperated the bottom 3 floors from the rest of the structure for the front side (in addition to adding a solid/non-window 'column' to try to add a bit more interest), and started to create a commerical/retail oriented ground floor in addition to an office building entranceway.

I did find a use for the thin strips of styrene on the ground floor, to create the window and door frames for an otherwise plain 'plate glass' street front for the building.

From this point, I started to assemble the four sides, with the large 'vertical column' (which was also 'scored' to have a consistent appearance to the rest of the building design) the progress of which is shown in the photo at right.


Which pretty much leads to the point where I am at right now, which is shown in the photo at the top.  The remaining tasks include some final detailing, particularly on the ground floor, building a roof, adding the lighting and interior details, masking some of the 'windows' on several floors to give off the effect of unoccupied floors, etc... and coming up with a corporate name/logo to emblazon on the top of the building.

I'll post photos of the final product once I've got it completed, but wanted to share this experience as it was a different approach than the first building.

A final comment is that using masking tape to create your window areas actually worked really well.  It is really important to ensure your tape has a good seal as the paint will seep through (and require time consuming clean up!).   I used a good quality grey primer spray paint for thus purpose.  Not the prettiest of colors, but a good neutral color for a building of this era I think.  I expect I will use this spray paint/masking tape technique again in the future for other modern structures, as it doesn't require the tedious task of cutting styrene and is fairly inexpensive.

UPDATE:

Building was finally completed several months later...click here!

Tomytec and Tomix buildings

Well, after the 19 or so stories of the "Godzilla Corporation's" high-rise office complex, time for a break with some smaller, gap-filling structures.

Way back in February I blogged about how fun the Tomytec building collection ('The Town (Machinami) Collection No.7' to be exact) was. Although the quality isn't great (more on that below), the relative value and diversity of building types is very intriguing for anyone looking for something a little different in their N Scale structures. Plus, they're a lot of fun.

I've done a couple of minor modification to a couple of these, I blogged about the KFC 'conversion' already, and below is a photo of a Chinese restaurant with relatively minor changes.

This was an easy three or four LED modification, with a 'homemade' Peking Garden sign (backlit with LED's) over the front.

You can also make out some of the 'quality' issues with this series in that photo, and its really to be expected.  The walls, floors, etc.... are somewhat warped, and the method that is used to assemble them (which is really just sliding tabs into grooves and held there by friction) tends to result in less than flush corners and joints.  This is not a design problem for Tomytec, as it appears these are aimed for more of a toy-like collector than serious modelers.  In truth, this doesn't bother me much, and there's some things you can do as a modeler to address these issues that are pretty simple.

On the other hand, the amount of screen printing or painting that goes into each one of these models is very much surprising compared to the standard fare seen in most 'serious' kits, and I've yet to actual repaint one of these Tomytec models as their colors and detailing actually work quite well (particularly for 'fill areas' in my city that won't be highly visible).  I should also mention that you get a little packet of 'detail parts' with virtually every building as well, including stairs, signage for the roof, and other various pieces that are made to snap into various holes placed in the roof, floors, walls, etc....

One thing that doesn't look right about the above picture? Well, if its going to be in a 'city', then its not going to sit all alone without some neighbors next to it! And that, my friends, is one way of addressing the 'warped walls'.

The next project combines three of the TomyTec buildings, removes all the walls (in fact, the center building is actually a corner building that has a triangular footprint) and leaves nothing except the storefronts (only one of which was modified from a very 'traditional' looking Japanese storefront, to a more modern plate glass sort of front).

The following photos show these buildings in the middle of construction prior to the lighting and final 'details':

The building with the clear plastic 'front' is going to end up as a 'bank', the middle building stays untouched (I like the "Fuji Grill" name and graphics too much), while the corner building on the end, with a sort of stucco exterior, gets some crazy color-changing LED's (a nightclub perhaps? not sure what the Japanese characters on it say the building is, but I think a shady little club in the city will work!).

From the 'other side' of the block:

Yes, that brick building on the far left is not part of the Tomytec collection, but I think it looks like it would fit right into this neighborhood.  I think this will make an interesting little area of my city...after the cold, serious 'high rises', this will look like that block not too far off where things are just a little bit edgier!

One other recent project has been the Tomix 4048 'bow front building' conversion to a hotel.  This was relatively easy, but took me forever due to distractions from other projects.  I originally came across this building on Scaper's impressive Flickr site, and knew that I had to have one.  I used two kits, and tried to use the extra ground floor as a 'normal floor' (albeit with high ceilings), to pull this off, I added a strip of styrene in the doorway gap, some clear plastic for the window, and hopefully pull of something that looks like it could be a 4th floor ballroom or something.

I also went a bit overboard and added some interior detail.  I made two 'beds' out of various plastic parts, used scrap paper for wallpaper, and added an  LED for a table lamp (in addition to a third LED that is right above the window shooting down) and of course, a figure doing something.

By the way, its important to get a light source as near to the window as possible (you can see my LED in place below, which did require some milling of the frame above it when I put it together), if you place a light near the 'back' of all your detail, it puts all your detail work in shadow, thus losing a lot of the value of doing this sort of work in the first place.

Here's a shot of the final 'room' with the lady standing there.

Arghh... yes, there's still an unslightly gap there between the building sections (still not done).  And a final shot of the building just prior to its getting its signage (the "Mercuit Hotel"....a name my daughter came up with that means nothing at all!).

The ground floor has some basic 'hotel registration' detail as well, nothing fancy (although I did use the elevator banks that come with the Tomix kit), just a few figures, scrap paper glued to foamcore to simulate  a desk, etc...

With this building, I also used an old technique that modellers have used to simulate window blinds for the first time.  I don't recall the name of this tape (and it was hard to find), but prior to duct tape, this is the sort of thing you would use for packages.  It really does give a good simulation of blinds or drapes (and now I have a huge roll of it for future buildings)!

Creating a skyscraper from scratch (Part 3)

This should be the final post on my attempt at 'scratch-building' an N scale skyscraper! In Part 1, I talked about the materials I used and the basic look; in Part 2, I described how I created the sidewalls, floors, and dealt with interior 'details'; and in this post (Part 3, if my math is right!), I will describe how I addressed the ground floor, and wired it up!

Ground Floor:

For the ground floor I decided that this was a pure office building - without any sort of retail businesses. I think we all know these buildings...usually a cavernous space with elevators, escalators and some modern art on the walls. Fortunately, this was easy, as I used some excess escalator and elevator pieces left over from some of my Kato structures (or maybe Tomix, forget which), applied a neutral looking tan color to a sheet of styrene for the floor, and printed out some fake 'walls' for the sides.
As I talked about a bit in Part 1, the trick with scratch-building buildings is the question of how do you make windows (walls are easy, right?)? Well...doors are a similar challenge! For the lobby entrance to the "Godzilla Corporation's" high rise, I had to improvise yet again. Most of the glass/window 'detail' is merely etched lines on plastic, but I wanted something a bit different so I attempted to try my hand at a 'revolving' door for the building entrance. This was pretty simple to create, as all I did was use a round piece of plastic that was about the right size, sliced it in half, and then glued both halves to the entry lobby plastic. Unfortunately, I messed up a bit and used CA glue (aka "super glue") when I should have gone with plastic cement, thus the ugly-looking 'fogging' around this part. Arg!

I used some excess metal wire leads (from clipped LED's) as the 'metal' parts of the door. While I regret the glue error, overall I think I got the effect I was looking for (and in reality, once on the layout, the 'fogging' won't be noticeable).
Electrical Wiring:

As is my obsession, I love to light my buildings! Unfortunately, I'm not an electrician, so I slog my way through this stuff the best I can! For lighting the interior of the building, I am using 3mm LED's (that were ordered online and dirt cheap) with the appropriate resistors. Again, as I'm not much of an electrician, I used a handy website for calculating the resistor code which puts out this convenient wiring diagram:
The actual LED's are placed in the building by poking the leads through the foamcore on the 'floor' section that will be the ceiling for the floor to be lit (I don't light every floor!). If that didn't completely confuse you, here's a photo that will:
What little experience I have had with wiring N Scale buildings has shown that creating something to collect and manage all of the resistors and power leads is necessary in order to manage all those wires (uh...that was redundant). I could have tried to create a PCB board (like I know what I'm doing!), but what I did instead was use a low-temp glue gun to glue the resistors to a narrow board that would act as a 'virtual' PCB board and be well hidden. Below is the initial stage of wiring the top and bottom floors before the 'virtual PCB' is installed (and note the 'notch' in the foam core floors where the wires/PCB board will slot in):
Once I got to a certain point, I placed the 'virtual PCB board' in the building where I placed the notches and completed all my soldering. Here's the ugly truth of this in all its glory right here:
After cutting out small rectangular openings on the top of the building for the corporate logo (made with several layers of laser-printed 'transparencies' and back-lit with LED's), and the initial work on the roof started, its time to plug this thing in and get a sense of whether or not I've been able to achieve a reasonable looking skyscraper!
Oh yeah, that LED sticking out of the top of the building is actually one of two blinking red LED's that I got from a company called "Evans Designs"....I've found their flashing LED's look good and already come ready to install with all the appropriate electronics and can be hooked right to the 12v DC power source. Once the roof is finalized, these blinking red LED's will be placed at the corners of the roof (which brings the total LED count to 29!).

The floors with lighting have a few interior details (as described in Part 2). Its a bit hard to make out what's happening on this floor, maybe their roughing up that guy on the right? Hmmm....
And finally, the 'lobby entrance' with the revolving door and scurrying office workers complete the building:
And here's another look from the perspective of an N Scale pedestrian:
In summary, I'm pretty happy. My biggest regret was the accident with the CA glue and I definitely overdid it in terms of 'interior detail' as the floors without lighting are dark enough that the lack of detail would not be noticeable. Additionally (and I knew this going into it) but the 1/2 inch thick smoked acrylic I used for the 'glass' was too thick. Its nice and stable (and heavy!), but if you look close, you can tell its a thick piece of acrylic! But hey, it was cheap and I didn't need to do any cutting!

Total cost? Ironically, the most expensive parts were the Evergreeen styrene strips used to create the concrete columns on the fascia/building. I think I have about $12 there. The smoked acrylic was around $3, LED's and resistors was probably around $8, plus $6.50 for the flashing red LED's from Evan's Designs, another $5 or so for the can of 'camouflage gray' paint used for the concrete, and the sheet of foam core was probably another $5 or so. Bottom line? Maybe around $40 or $50 dollars.

So, the "Godzilla Corporation" finally has their corporate headquarters! Now they can get about their work of urban redevelopment and environmental mitigation (get it? ;-) ) in their fancy new office in downtown Quinntopia! They will soon have neighbors, as I am starting work on another scratch-built high-rise...the Saruman corporation!

CLICK HERE for Part 1!
CLICK HERE for Part 2!

Doubling up a Vollmer 7728 Gift Shop

I purchased a Vollmer 7728 N Scale Gift Shop almost a year ago. It sat on the shelf while I tried to figure out what to do with it, until I finally decided to order another one and attempt to make this a much taller building than the original designers intended, similar to what I did with the Greenmax 29 building. This was a very tricky kitbash, as the front of this building has unusual recesses and different windows on virtually each floor.

The first step, whenever I put together a new building, is get a paper towel and some water and clean off the sprues. I then remove the parts from the sprues and paint them (given how light the parts are, I usually place them on some masking tape so they don't go blowing off onto the ground or worse!). If I plan to light the building interior, I also put a coat of paint on the inside walls to ensure that no light can pass through the plastic walls.

My final plan was to combine the top two floors of each model together, as these floors are all 'recessed'. That will make the bottom four floors flush with the building front. I ended up having to use some styrene strips to make the entire front look seamless.


This is another 'fashion' store (I'm getting my daughter to help me come up with store ideas, and she thought my city needed more fashion stores!) but rather than use mannequins (e.g. N scale figures) in the shop windows as I've done with other stores, I just used images that look like those you'd see in a fashion store window. I sort of expect that this building won't be as visible as others, so I didn't go overboard with a lot of detail like I tend to do with others!

Again, lot's of LED's went into this building, and there is even one floor where the apartment dwellers can be seen inside (although the photo here is pretty crappy...can't get the camera to focus on the interior!). For most floors, I used the 'window coverings' that Vollmer includes...these do a nice job of simulating drapers and ensure that there's a bit of variety on every floor like you'd expect from a 'real' apartment building.

On the back side, there are large windows that I diffused with some laquer spray and overlaid with some clear orange acetate. I don't even know if this side will be visible but...well, at least its done.

All in all, this will be a bright - and colorful!- building on the layout! I still haven't decided what the roof sign will be yet (the sign up there now in the photo is a placeholder) but that can be worked out with other details later!

Creating a skyscraper from scratch (Part 2)

In my last post, I talked about getting the basic materials to create my "Godzilla Corporation" global headquarters skyscraper. In this post, I'm going to add the sidewalls, work on the back wall, create floors and do something to decorate the interior....

The Sidewalls:

The photo at right shows the 15.5 inch long strip of "sintra" material that I will use for the side walls. This skyscraper will only have windows in the front and back, so 'blank' concrete walls work just fine for the sides. Sintra is a material I have used a lot of in my layout, and its a good material for buildings as well, although its too thick to work for walls on smaller buildings, as part of a large skyscraper structure (representing thick reinforced concrete walls), it works fine.

I made the sintra side walls about 1.5 in longer than the smoked acrylic to allow for the ground floor entrance, shops etc... I will use some traditional 'clear' acrylic for the ground floor, which I will cover in a later post.
After attaching the two sides, I then started work on the back of the skyscraper. Since this building will sit in a block with other, shorter, buildings, I painted the first 8 inches or so and left the top half clear. I then applied the 'scoring' to the exterior with the same measurements used for the front (16mm between 4mm floors).As you can see from the above photo...the building can stand (I'm like a proud father all over again! Let's just hope this 'baby' doesn't learn how to walk! Arg....bad joke. Sorry!)! However, one thing you'll notice is that its easy to see right through the smoked acrylic 'windows' through to the wood of the plywood behind it. Even with the 'back' wall attached, the building will look more like a semi-transparent block than a skyscraper if I don't do something to change this.

The Office Floors:

The solution to ensure it doesn't end up looking like a big chunk of empty plastic was to use traditional foam core. I cut 18 pieces of foam core to fit inside the skyscraper (also cutting out a rectangular area on the backside which will be an access area for where my wiring for the interior lighting will run).I then spray painted just the tops of the foam core with an appropriately neutral looking color, and added in scraps of foam core, office furniture, and other little details to give some dimension to the floors. I only added real detail to about 3 floors, as I expect that these 3 floors will be well-lit with LED's with the others being relatively 'dark'.
Its important that only the top of the foam core recieves the spray painting, as the black edges will go against the inside walls opposite of where the 4mm scoring is on the outside, and since the sides of the floor foam core pieces will show through, its important that they not attract attention. Hopefully, this way, it looks like there's a real floor there (the thickness of this acrylic, which you can see in an above photo quite clearly, does concern me a bit. It'll be interesting to see what the final product turns out to look like!)!

Interior Walls:

The other detail to address is the interior sides of the building. Having 'black' for interior walls (the unpainted color of the sintra I used) just wouldn't look right (unless this was an office building for vampires, but...no, no, let's not go there...). So I decided to create some 'fake' details on my computer. I used a basic drawing program to create 16mmx 32mm rectangles and filled them in with muted office colors, small images of office-like posters, and other stuff. I then separated this rectangle with another 4mm black rectangle (this is where the foam core will cover it up). After doing a lot of copy and paste to reproduce 19 floors of office walls on both sides of the building, I printed out on my color inkjet, cut to the right shape, sprayed the backs with adhesive spray, and applied to the inside walls! Viola! Instant detail!
That's it for this update! If you have a questions or comments (thanks Don!) please leave a comment! Next time...its lighting and ground floor detail! Whoohoo!

CLICK HERE for Part 3!
CLICK HERE for Part 1!

Creating a skyscraper from scratch (Part 1)

Or....How the "Godzilla Corporation" built their major downtown office complex!

I've been thinking a lot lately about attempting to build my own skyscraper. Given the relatively sparse offerings (although, not as bad as one would think) for modern N scale skyscrapers, I wondered if it was possible to build my own. I spent a lot of time researching and thinking about various materials, and I think I've found a relatively simple method to create a very cost effective, and hopefully very cool looking, modern skyscraper.

Actually, I have two different skyscraper scratch-building projects going on right now, but I am just talking now about the building that (I think) will become the "Godzilla Corporation" worldwide headquarters.

Materials - Use what you find:

Windows are the hard part. Obviously, I don't have the ability to cast scale window frames, etc... so the key is how to most effectively simulate it? As I started studying 'real' modern skyscrapers, what I notice is that the lack of detail - really just lines where the exterior glass plates come together - should make this kind of project much simpler. Additionally , most modern buildings seem to always use some sort of tinted glass. This can be achieved with automotive tinting film, or (and what I will use in this project) 'smoked' plastic/acrylic sheets.

In fact, I got lucky (which is one nice thing about not having too much of a pre-determined plan!). On a recent visit to the TAP Plastics shop near me (which is a shop which specializes in plastics, typically for signs and so forth) I was looking through their scrap bin and came across 2 pieces of 14 x 3.5 inch 'smoked' acrylic.

I also picked up some of their other 'scraps' which will be good material for testing and for the other skyscraper project I mentioned earlier. The best part? Cheap! $2.50 a pound was the rate, and I think I had a pound of scrap total!

Making Windows Out of Nothing at all:

There were 3 methods I was considering for transforming this boring plastic/acrylic material into something that looked like a skyscraper: Using strips of styrene (or plastic) glued on; Masking and painting, and finally, 'scoring' the plastic with a knife. I did some early tests with scoring and liked what I found! I scored lines across the surface at 16mm intervals, then added another score 4mm after that, and so on.What's cool is that just one score with the xacto knife was all it took to give a pretty good representation of the seams of a modern skyscraper. I fiddled around with rubbing some silver and white paint into the score marks, but found it was unnecessary (at least on this dark, 'smoked' acrylic).

Of course windows, even on modern skyscrapers, are not made of a single plane for each floor, so I needed something to run vertically. I could have added more scoring, but I wanted to try something different. I tested the look of adding some vertical 3mm styrene strips and I was very happy with the look!
Clearly, its a very '1970's' looking skyscraper, but I'll take it! I used some styrene 90 degree corners for the edges which fortunately look good with the vertical strips. I glued the corner styrene pieces (using a hot glue gun) with enough of a gap to fit my side sections (the flat piece to the right in the above photo) but that is for my next post!
On my next post, I'll talk about adding the side walls, ground floor details, office floors and other stuff! Please leave a comment if you find this interesting! Thanks for reading!

CLICK HERE for Part 2!
CLICK HERE for Part 3!

Plastic Surgery on a German Toy Store! ("Spielwaren")

A couple of posts back I mentioned the 'remodel' I was going to attempt on another of the old, built kits I had recently picked up. This building, with the prominent "Spielwaren" raised letter sign ("toys" in German I believe) has since 'gone under the knife' to come out as a slightly different type of toy store!

So here's the original building "before":
And here's the 'modified' version "after":
The difference? Repainted, added LED's, new (flat) roof, and laser-printed color decals.
Yes, eventually I will talk about trains again, instead of just buildings! :-) But as I am doing some additions and changes to the layout (all of which involve adding a new yard and expanding the downtown area) all of the trains are boxed up safely out of harm's way!

Atlas Skyscraper Complete (& modified)

Atlas produced a line of skyscraper kits well over a decade ago (as near as I can tell). Although they can still be found on eBay, they tend to be fairly pricey. The kits were produced in 3 versions; a square, rectangle, and a hexagon version (the later was a sort of gold/copper color vs the dark grey/black of the 2 former models).

I was fortunate to get the square one at a hobby shop for something close to its original retail price, which was a great find! However, I soon realized this thing is huge! Not just in height (which is what I wanted/expected!), but in footprint...the total base of the square skyscraper is about 9 inches!

Well, I had to make a choice...use the skyscraper as is, and take up a lot of urban real estate with one structure, give up and put it up on eBay for someone else to use, or cut it down and modify it to make it fit with my layout.
I chose the later, although with some trepidation. The materials used by Atlas in this kit are a fairly thick sheet of 'brittle' plastic...not the relatively 'soft' plastic most kits are made of. So cutting it was going to be very interesting (This plastic also has a slight amount of transparency, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it - uh...no pun intended).

So, what did I do:

1. Cutting. I took about 1/3 of the front and back off the kit. Making the front of the building around 6 inches. I cut the sides by about half, slightly less than 4 inches deep. The dimensions were made to fit into the 'city block' that I had in mind for this building. I cut it the old-fashioned way: scoring with a knife. This was a long, tedious process to do with 8 different sections, and there are some areas where the plastic was just not willing to score nicely and 'cracked' a bit. Yikes...."try not to think what you COULD be getting for this on eBay right now" went through my mind a couple of times. Ultimately, I got it done!

2. General Lighting. Again, added a bazillion LED's. A flashing LED for the antenna on the roof. A total of seven LED's for the backlit "HSBC" signs (which is "Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Company" a great global 'brand' to go with my 'globalization' theme), an SMD over the office door, and about 5 LED's to light the HMV store also on the ground floor.

3. Office lighting. Before assembly, I taped the pieces together adjacent to the piece it would later be glued to. On the inside surface, I then used 1/2 in masking tape to 'block' random windows, spray painted the inside surface to create an 'opaque' area, then removed the masking tape. I later used some 'under counter' LED strips (from the local hardware store) glued to a central column inside the hollow building to give the transparent window areas some light. I may have to add more to get more light, but it works for now.

4. Assembly. Assembly on this bad boy required the big guns....so I 'borrowed' my wife's low-temp hot glue gun. Love that thing. The big challenge was getting a nice fit (I won't say seamless...that's hard enough with the factory finish!) between the connecting sections that I had cut and scored. I sanded down the edge so that my scored sides would have a 45 degree bevel, well, I tried the best I could. I give myself a "C" on that one. Something to come back to and work on later.

5. Other stuff. I had to create my own roof. The roof system on the original model was just inadequate to use for this sort of modification. Same with the first floor (with the exception of the 'entrance doors').

And that's it! Easy huh? Actually...about two weekends of work! What do you think?

Buildings and Building The City

Ahhh... Fall! While many of my American readers are thinking "Football!", for me, the cool air and shorter daylight means more time to spend on the layout! My current focus is downtown and the revisions I'm making to the layout driven by a desire for a more interesting, colorful and fun 'downtown'/ urban area on my layout (I spoke about this a bit here).

The image at top shows what sort of 'chaos' the layout is in right now...in fact, all trains have been removed and safely boxed up! What I am doing in the photo above is continuing to work on getting all of the various buildings I have to neatly align to more or less similar sized city 'blocks' (as I talked about here).

Today, I've been using a hot glue gun to attach the buildings together. I wasn't sure how I was going to do this, but hot glue seems to be the answer. The photo below shows the buildings in variuos stages of getting connected to each other. The wood boards are used to prop up the buildings so the wiring for all the lights doesn't get in the way and result in the buildings being unevenly attached.

The below photo is just another close up of the buildings


In addition to putting together the city blocks, I'm also 'modding' out the buildings that haven't seen any attention yet. I recently won a neat lot of older German N scale buildings (Kibri, Vollmer, etc...) and am now updating with new paint, lights, advertising, people, and other details. The below was a fairly simple building, but lights and some minimal detail have made this one of my favorites! :-)


Believe it or not, this building has 12 LED's in it! 4 for the 'backlit' "Super 24" sign, 2 SMD's for signs/advertising, 2 more for the rooftop billboard, 3 for the store interior, and one to backlight the upstairs apartments.








This is another building from my eBay 'score' that will need some work. The 'paper backing' for the upstairs apartment windows works fine, but for the ground floor shop display windows, I'll need to something a bit more interesting. Fortunately I just got a new shipment of LED's and resistors so I can start to add the lighting soon!

Okay, enough blogging...it's a rainy Saturday afternoon, the family is all out doing what they like to do...so I'm back to train room!