Thrifty's box

Building up the walls and gluing them into the basic box structure that is Thrifty's was rather fun. I think it's because I haven't built a model from card and wood in awhile, and the change from plastics was refreshing.

Some preparation was required before the walls could be assembled.

The window and door frames in the entry were cut from a piece of 2-ply Strathmore 500 series Bistrol board, as was the entry's roof. The side walls are pieces of 4-ply. 

Prior to assembly the entry pieces were blackened with a Sharpie pen. At this point, as you can see in the photo, there is a roughness to some of the window frames that had to be cleaned up with a sharp knife. 

Once that was done, a piece of thin clear plastic was used for the glass and attached to the back of the window and door frame with transfer tape.

The entry was then built up and glued into place in the front wall opening. 

On the left side of Thrifty's, the prototype photos show some sort of recessed area. It isn't clear what it is, but I interpreted it to be a door, maybe to an office or stairs up to the top level. I built up this recessed area from balsa strips and card, using a simple Tichy Train casting for the door.

One other thing I should point out about the facade is that originally I tried to fold the sloped roof face - where the dormers are attached - into shape so the facade could be made from a single piece of card. It turns out the topmost 1' strip on the roof face had to be cut off from the facade piece for the front wall to accurately attach to the side walls - the 4-ply card was just too thick to get a crisp crease that would allow the lower roof fold to fit gap-less to the side walls.

The walls required reinforcement. I have a lot of balsa strips in my scrap box from projects I intended to start, but never did. Those 1/4" square pieces were bought a few years back with the good intention of using them to build a 1/24 scale model of E. L. Moore's Cal's Lumber Yard. It got as far as cutting one wall from Gatorboard, but then was overtaken by events. Anyhow, it left me with some strips of balsa, a few of which I cut up and Weld Bonded to the inside walls of Thrifty's as stiffeners.

Although Weld Bond was used more-or-less everywhere to stick things together, when it came time to glue the walls into a box, I used 3M transfer tape. That stuff grabs fast and there's no mess. I figured I'd give it try on holding the walls together.

Over on the right I'm showing a piece of transfer tape applied to a side wall end edge. When ready for assembly, that piece of carrier paper is peeled back to expose the glue strip. 

The nice thing about transfer tape is there's no potential for mess during assembly, and the bond is basically instantaneous, so there's no clamping and waiting for glue to dry.

You can see in this image some brick paper on a side wall. Both sides and the back had brick paper glued on before building up the box. I used Superquick brick paper as it's quite thin. 

And that's that for the basic structure. I'm thinking of having a go at the dormers next.