Thrifty's is open for business!

Cold weather, snow, and a lockdown have helped me keep building. Over the weekend I took the opportunity to finish Thrifty's Yonge St. store.

Although they can't be seen in the opening photo, there are 2 dormers on the upper floor. It's some sort of mansard roof up there, along with 2 arched top dormers facing the street.

My dormers are based on window castings from Tichy Train. The ones I had in my spares box had many more mullions than the prototype, so most had to be cut off. Once that was done, two vertical mullions were cut for each window frame from 0.010" thick styrene and glued in place.

The dormers were laid out on 2-ply Strathmore Bristol board. These are basically the structural backings for each of the windows. 

The angles for the dormer side walls are measured from the drawing.

The dormer side walls are folded up once each piece is cut out. I used a scriber to etch the fold lines before cutting out the pieces.

 

The window frames were glued to the dormer walls, and then the complete assembly was glued to the wall on the uppermost floor. These units were painted black and outfitted with clear plastic windows prior to installation.

The semi-circular dormer roofs are cut from 3x5 card. You'll notice that these dormers are not exact replicas of the prototype. They're simplified representations. As they're not the focus of the model, I didn't feel like spending much time on them, and that entire area on the prototype is painted black, so there wouldn't be much to see anyway.

I papered the upper floor wall with self-adhesive block paper from Micro-Mark as I thought it had a nice texture that would work well up there. The problem turned out that the texturing was a little too subtle, and was mostly obliterated once painted flat black. Live and learn. 

The upper edge of the main wall was built up from pieces of card and balsa. Once all the elements were glued in place the whole thing was painted flat black.

The decorative fence along the top of the facade is made from Atlas' HO-scale keyhole fencing from my spares box. I'll replace it if I come across something a little more decorative - and cheap :-)

The interior is a picture of a jeans store interior I found on the internet - it isn't representative of the Thrifty's store in the '80s.

On many other builds I'd have separate light boxes for the main sign and the interior. This time I decided to use 'ambient' light and simply put a light on the underside of the roof and have it illuminate both areas.

Last year I bought some LED button lights from Amazon for the Canadian Press complex. I had one left and stuck it to the underside of the roof. It has a built in battery and an on-off switch. It'll conk out one day and need replacement - we'll see how long that takes.

One obvious problem with this approach is that the sign's interior structure, along with some internal balsa stiffeners cast a shadow on the inside upper part of the main sign, so illumination is not quite uniform. Doesn't look too bad, but it's not perfect.

I didn't spend anytime detailing the sides or back. As mentioned in a previous post, they were just covered with brick paper so they didn't look too odd.

Well, that's that. It didn't take as long as many projects I've undertaken, but it wasn't as fast as I had hoped. Small steps I guess.