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O Gauge / O Scale Forums and Individual Blogs for Model Railroading

What is the J&C Studios O Gauge Archive?
(Guest)   JCS Archive   JohnBoy   Cousin Suites
 
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Cousin Suites
JohnBoy
Joined: May 14, 2008
Topics: 110 Replies: 517 Topics: 110
My Archive Category | My Website
posted Sep 2, 2008: 
Cousin Suites is the first building I made using mirror acrylic sheets. I wanted to try this concept out on a smaller building before committing to a larger purchase of the material for the bigger building projects I had in mind.

Since the sheets are made in 24" x 12" sizes, all I had to do was order 4 of these to form my building. The first thing to do was start laying the 1/16" black Chart Pak tape to form the window patterns:





You can barely see in this photo that I made two templates out of matteboard to help me align the black tape patterns. There's one template at the top and another at the bottom, and they are marked with 1" black tick marks.





The flip side of the templates has markings every 1.5" - so I could use that for the horizontal stripes. Here's what a single side looks like after all the tape has been applied:





And here's what the back side looks like:





Note that the tape is wrapped around the back side by a good bit: this is important, as the corner struts that are installed next will prevent the tape from peeling up.





This is a shot of two sides being glued together. Note the two clamps at the top and bottom. Unlike some of the other buildings I've made, these don't have open windows to sneak more clamps into in the middle, so I could only clamp the very top and very bottom. To keep some pressure on the middle sections, I leaned a 2x4 against the middle of the seam, and used another scrap piece of wood to spread out the pressure point a bit. A primitive technique, but it worked.
 
JohnBoy
Joined: May 14, 2008
Topics: 110 Replies: 517 Topics: 110
My Archive Category | My Website
posted Sep 3, 2008: 
Here's a shot of all four sides glued together, sitting on the half-height wall between our family room and kitchen. The thing you have to watch with mirror buildings is that of course they reflect everything around them!





This photo shows the diagonal bracing on all four corners of the top.





The same thing was done on the bottom end:





I then set about one of my favorite aspects of making these city buildings: making a roof top piece. This is where you can pretty much let your imagination run wild, as any combination of machines, compressors, vents, pipes/conduits, towers, lights, and other structures can be cobbled together to make a convincing and interesting roof scene.





Here's what it looks like in place, but this was before I had completed all the details:





This photo shows the boo-boo on the mirror surface resulting from me being a little too enthusiastic with the pressure on the clamp when gluing on the corner struts. Maybe some day I will make a little platform dangling from the roof, with a couple of hardhats trying to install a replacement glass panel.




 
JohnBoy
Joined: May 14, 2008
Topics: 110 Replies: 517 Topics: 110
My Archive Category | My Website
posted Sep 3, 2008: 
All in all, this project went pretty smoothly, and it served exactly the purpose I intended, which was to learn some techniques for constructing tall glass buildings.





This project introduced me to Formula 560 (aka "Canopy Glue"). This adhesive was created for gluing the tissue-paper canopy material onto the balsa wood frames of model aircraft. It does a pretty good job of bonding together plastics to wood. What I've come to really appreciate about this glue is that it is water-based and cleans up very nicely without marring your surfaces or eating skin off your fingers, and as an extra great bonus: it dries crystal clear, which hides a lot of mistakes. All of this makes for a very forgiving and easy to use glue.

The success of Cousin Suites essentially paved the way for the more ambitious Mirimar project, which was to be the first double-stacked mirror building model for my layout. I just need to be gentler with the clamps...
 

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