After mostly finishing Cousin Suites, I was anxious to apply what I learned on my real goal: a taller, blue-mirror office building. To get it to be taller meant making two smaller buildings and stacking them to achieve a taller one. This is for two reasons: 1) I found that anything more than 24" tall was rather unwieldy during the construction process, and also when handling the building after it's completed, and 2) The blue-mirror material (like most colored acrylics) is sold in 24" x 12" sheets, so the tallest I can get is two feet anyway.
What this meant is that I needed to be very careful about making sure the two buildings lined up properly, so that the seam between them is not obvious.
So the first steps were just like Cousin Suites - applying the same 1/16" black Chart Pak tape in a grid, to form the window pattern. I used the same marked templates that I used on Cousin Suites to line up the vertical and horizontal stripes:
I took even greater care in mounting the corner struts this time, with the understanding that it was going to help prevent a mis-align between the upper and lower buildings.
This time, I applied corner struts to both the long edges of only two sides. With Cousin Suites, I glued one corner strut to each building side, and then went about gluing them together vertically, one side at a time. This was challenging in that applying even pressure to form a good bond all the way up and down the edges was difficult to do while the building was standing up.
This time, I went a different route and created custom jigs:
The gap in the middle is just wide enough to squeeze in a 3/8" wooden strut, and the 1/8" thickness of the mirror sheet.
This allowed me to place two sides on the table at a time, horizontally but perpendicular on the table, and then lay a third side on top of these:
This did two things for me: it allowed me to glue two edges together at the same time, and it allowed me to place weights along each edge so that a more even pressure was applied to the whole edge while the glue cured.
It also allowed me to look at it from the top and bottom to ensure things were straight and square:
Again, I took great care in making sure the corners and edges were as perfect as I could get them:
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Progress: