Lurking in the Background: AHM's kit #5815, 'Repair Shop'

I've wanted to get my hands on the old AHM kit called the Repair Shop (kit #5815) for many years. It has such an intriguing look, what with that entire second storey completely panelled with windows. Back in January I finally came across a reasonably priced one on eBay from a seller in New Brunswick.

I'm not sure what sort of repairs were imagined to be going on in this building. The base has what looks like a track running through it from one door to the other, but those doors are too small to get anything other than a rather flat, flat car inside. Actually, all the doors seem too small to me. Maybe this building is actually in TT or N scale and not HO as implied on the box. 

The parts were all present, nicely detailed, square, and cleanly molded.

Regardless, my plan was to repurpose the building to be part of the main drag on the Way Out Layout. It'll be some sort of gentrified restaurant, art gallery, coffee shop, or some such thing. 

I've been working on this project on and off this year since it showed up on my doorstep in the dead of winter. I've started on it again and thought I'd make a post about it to try and get myself back into a more serious blogging groove. 

The side doors seemed too rural and industrial for the setting I have in mind, so I decided to fill in the openings with some sheet styrene with a molded on block pattern. I could have used brick sheet, but I didn't want the final result to appear as a failed attempt to match the kit's bricks. 

Jumping a head a little you can see I just painted the blocked up door openings with a loose grey mixture. I'll do some weathering a little later during construction.

Those big door openings on the end walls will be filled with typical steel-framed doors and windows you'd encounter on stores in many urban areas. I cut some clear plastic inserts (those are the blue rectangles in the above photo - the blue is the anti-scratch film) for 'glass'. From 0.010" thick styrene sheet I cut frames for both sides of the 'glass'.

I recently started working on this again after parking it back in June. Up there is where the project currently stands: I'm attaching the window and door frames to the clear plastic with 3M Transfer Tape and getting the finished units ready for installing in the walls. Once the other windows have 'glass' installed I'll move onto working on the interior. My plans are for a removable roof and some interior lights.