Grilles: 15 year servicing

Cleaned and repaired Grilles at its new home on the Way Out Layout

I'm cleaning up the Way Out Layout and getting it ready for showing off at Christmas. I want Grilles (yes, it's apostrophe challenged as is the sorry way in our world) to be on the layout, but over time parts have broken off, and it has accumulated a lot of dust in its 15 year life. 

Grilles in its sorry 15 year old, pre-cleaned, and pre-repaired state.

I collected up the loose parts, glued them back on, and then removed as much dust as I could. This low effort activity breathed some new life into the building, and it doesn't look too bad on the layout. So good in fact it shows its neighbours need some cleaning too!

Rail & Launch Control building shell done

It's been a very long time since I started on the Rail & Launch Control building for the Tintin 2001 layout. I had a good long look at the shell and decided there wasn't much detailing left to do, so I jumped in and had a go.

Interior for the garage.

The biggest job was to fill in the interior of the building's garage end. For this I built a little box from styrene sheet and stuck on some styrene pieces to give the walls a little surface detail. That big rectangular hole in the ceiling is for lighting.

Interior unit installed in garage end.

Most of that surfacing will not be readily viewable, but a little something was needed for visual interest.

Finally, I took advantage of some unusually fine weather and gave the shell a spray of matte white paint outside to help unify the look of the thing.

The next step will be to add windows and interior lighting. I'll deal with Moon dust weathering once it's on the layout.

TD Centre in Girder & Panel?

Left: A skeleton sketch for a TD Centre model | Right: The fire lookout tower frame

As well as the fire lookout tower, over the summer I also played around with the idea of building the TD Centre model in Girder & Panel. I was thinking it would be both an easier means of construction, and fit in with the vibe of creating the model with a construction toy made in Toronto during the same era as the TD Centre itself was built. Ok, well, that TD Centre frame shown up there is built from Kenner components. I'd have to find a lot more Peter-Austin parts to pull off this project.

It's an interesting concept, but as I framed out the structure it dawned on me it would be a much more difficult way of building.

Centre: A card sketch of a possible 'TD Centre' panel | Ends: Kenner box-stock panels

For one thing, I'd need 88 little, custom-made wall panels for covering the thing, plus some 'glass' ones for the bottom. Mass producing them is not something I'm interested in doing.

Although, I still like the concept of creating fictional construction kits of landmark Canadian buildings built in the 1960s from a Canadian construction toy from the same era.

As I dream on, I'll leave you with these silent movie clips of Toronto shot in 1978 I recently stumbled across. Watch for a glimpse of the TD Centre early on.

Floors for the lookout tower

It's not too straight without the diagonal braces

That red assemblage of Peter-Austin girders, aka the fire lookout tower, has appeared in several posts about the Inglenook Lake layout. I've been thinking a lot about how to transform it from a skeletal form to a credible HO scale forest fire lookout tower, but over the last few days I got out my tools and materials and got down to some serious work.

The first step is floors, and how to link them with stairs.

A floor template was made and then traced multiple times onto a sheet of 0.030" thick sheet styrene.
Those holes are stairway openings.

I played around with various stairway organizations: wrapping them around the interior perimeter in a spiral from floor-to-floor; keeping all the stairs to one side; and finally, settling on a simple zig-zag up the centre of the structure. This last one allowed for the most room for the imaginary hauling of things up the stairs, and for stepping off one stairway to the next with enough clearance, all the while keeping each floor's perimeter free and clear for easy viewing into the forest.

For stairs I'm going to use Plastruct item number 90662. The packaging of these items is weird in that it states the stairs are HO-scale and 1:100. I ignored that. When placed near an HO-scale figure they look right, and inside the tower any issues with scale won't be noticeable. 

Test fitting the floors. They aren't glued in, just press fit.

Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm trying to make whatever parts I create for this thing be as stylistically close to original Peter-Austin parts as I can. Yes, I'll be painting the parts, but I want to see if I can create the illusion of a fictitious Peter-Austin play set being used to create a credible HO-scale structure. 

The roof is a laminate of styrene squares with a corrugated piece on top.
The notches on the inner ply are to set over pegs in the girders.

The structure still looks a bit clunky at this stage with its odd, toy-like colours and not so straight frame. All readily correctable as construction progresses. So far so good though. 

Wanderin'

I stumbled across this simple improvisational kitbash of Revell's Engine House on a vendor's table at last month's model railway swap meet. It's always good to see these old things out and about in the world. No, I didn't buy it as I've got a lot on my plate as it is, and that relic needs a lot of love to bring it back to life.

Ok, after Billy Preston really lightened my mood, I stumbled across VIA Rail getting into the music genre for study, sleep, meditation, focusing, and unwinding with this video entitled, Relaxing Train Sounds for Sleeping:

In case you were wondering, there's a French version too (or maybe I should reverse things and say there's an English version too :-) ) ! 

As the calming train sounds got me all relaxed and horizontal I started again to think about the pleasant horizontality of the Expeditor floatplane:

The Expeditor and the Lockheed Model 12 Electra Junior both are cool expressions of mid to late 1930s aerodynamic streamlining that I quite like.

The floatplane version of the Bronco doesn't have that highly planar sleekness, but it does have a purposeful look to it. 

Well, the time change is getting the better of me, so I'll leave you with some classic Billy Preston, and a dash of Anthony Bourdain: