Opening Soon! Thé Noir at its new location

Paparazzi mob Thé Noir's big location reveal

After publishing the LOL video and thinking about Michael's comments I figured I should note that Thé Noir* has a place of honour on the current layout. Instead of being on a city street, it's now located on Ocean View Lane, with a view of the ocean :-) And, it's right beside the natural history museum. Prime real estate indeed. There is a problem though: no on-street parking. Walk-in and streetcar accessible only.  Stay tuned for the Grand Re-Opening!

*Note: Improvements include straightening the sign!

New lights for the The Noir cafe

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm continuing to update, repair and renovate some of the buildings on the Lost Ocean Line.

The cafe didn't have any interior lights. When I wanted to fake some lighting for staging photos, I'd just open the roof and drop in  a small LED connected to a battery. That was ok for background shots, but didn't allow for photos near or inside the building, so I built an overhead light fixture from some styrene scraps and two grain-of-wheat bulbs.

The bulbs aren't glued into place and can be removed if they burn out. The wiring snakes through the styrene trough that keeps the fixtures in place, goes down through the kitchen area, and pops out the bottom of the building for connection to the layout accessory power.

As well as lighting, I added a sign above the back door and a small garden for outside seating. It needs some tables, chairs, and people, but that's for another time.

The ‘B3’ becomes ‘Thé Noir’

Since peeling off the old letters from the B3 I’ve been looking for suitable sign material. I was brewing some of Stash’s Double Bergamot Earl Grey Tea, and the words ‘black tea’ on the French side of box seemed like an ideal sign.  I cut them out of the box, attached the card to a thin styrene backing, and - voila ! - a new sign. It seems to go much better with this building than did the painted foam letters. Now I need to drink up all this tea so I can buy some more and get another box for a sign for the other side :-)

Let the B and 3 chips fall where they may

I finally decided I really didn’t like the lettering on the B3 and carefully pulled it off with a pair of tweezers. Luckily they didn’t leave a trace, and the walls are back to their pristine condition. Now, I just need to find a suitable replacement.

The B3 and the small buildings game

The B3 has been an interesting project for me. I usually have a few on the go, ones I ‘should’ be making progress on, and others that I’ve started more or less on a whim. The whim ones more often than not turn out to be more fun and surprising. That was certainly true for the B3. Once the basic building was glued up, I lifted off the old dictionary I was using to hold the walls down on the floor during the drying phase, had a good look at the project, and, presto!, I got an instant feeling of goodness from it. I still need to add lighting, a bit of roof and interior detail, and a little light weathering, but I liked how it was shaping up.

As for construction, all the pieces, except for the floor, were cut from 0.020 inch styrene; the floor is 0.080 inch. The L-shaped windows on the ends were glued up from Grandt Line O-scale moldings. All the other window and door moldings are HO-scale Tichy Train items. The brick paper is from Micro-Mark. The B3 letters on the end walls are foam items that scrapbook hobbyists use that I picked up at Michaels’ and painted to match the main windows. However, I’m a little ambivalent about them and they might get scraped off.

Over the Labour Day weekend I learned about H.G. Wells’ 1911 book Floor Games (You can find a copy of the text here). It’s a charming description of games he and his young sons played based on ‘building’ cities and towns and landscapes on the floor of their house using wind-up trains, tin soldiers, wood blocks and other found objects. I’ve been thinking for awhile that the projects I’ve been working on like the B3 aren’t model building projects at all, and reading Floor Games made me think that these projects are more the result of game play than model building. Some sort of ‘small buildings game’ following Wells’ lead.

The game is pretty simple once I started to think of the activity in those terms. The game pieces are: 1, a selection box of HO-scale window and door moldings from Tichy Trains (some other brand or set would do just as well); 2, some miscellaneous window and moldings that I’ve bought because they were either on sale or looked interesting or both; 3, some miscellaneous sheets or pieces of styrene – some with molded patterns like metal siding or bricks; 4, brick papers; 5, paints. Also, some figures and vehicles are good to have around for scaling things. A well stocked spares box comes in handy too but isn’t a strict necessity. Some basic tools for making styrene models are needed.

The ‘game’ involves fiddling with the pieces to find arrangements that seem interesting and maybe meet some need for the layout. For me, I usually have a starting idea and then play around with the pieces to try and make it happen, but usually what actually occurs is some other configuration arises based both on the original idea and the parts – basically, game play changes preconceived ideas. There really aren’t any rules, just as what is described in Floor Games doesn’t seem rule bound. One gets a sense of how to proceed by just proceeding with what’s on hand and seeing where that goes. In Floor Games, Wells goes on at length about what happens during a game and its outcome, but doesn’t elaborate much on rules. In more conventional terms, the small buildings game is a type of scratch-building, but without an emphasis on replicating a particular real-world object, or even being close to similar to a real building.

Anyway, I think I’ll park the B3 project for awhile and move onto some layout work.

Progress on the interior at the B3

I’ve been building up the interior over the last few days. I’m just going to do some rudimentary work and leave detailing for another time. However, I did do some upfront planning about lighting – hopefully I’ve learned my lesson from the McGregor Park Library problem :-)

The interior walls that make up the food prep area and counter sides are cut from 0.020 inch styrene.

The B3 is clearly a selectively compressed building, with the emphasis on compressed. In reality it would be far too small for any sort of everyday working café or bar. With this structure I just wanted to hit the highlights of what might be the main features of such a place, hint at the style I have in mind for this part of the city, and also have something that would fit the available space. It would be a place to buy a coffee or sandwich – probably to-go – and head out to a picnic table near the beach, or grab a streetcar and head home. If you’re looking for something more substantial, you can walk down the boardwalk to Moe’s barbecue place near the beach. There’s also a streetcar stop down there to take you home so you don’t need to walk back to the city when you’re done. However, if you’re looking for a band, a better view of the ocean, and something more upbeat, catch the streetcar at the Cedar Heights stop across from the Fortran building and go over to Grilles.

Inside the B3 there will be a few chairs and a couple of small tables in case the weather is bad. And there’ll be a Hammond B3 organ for a little dinner music. I don’t know how I’m going to build one in HO-scale, but I’m going to give it a try sometime! 

The B3 Café: Basic Pieces

I want a building to sit between the Oceanview hotel and the Fortran building. It seems the best choice is a café of some sort. The one I have in mind will open both to the street and ocean. Those big L-shaped windows that form most of the end facades are made up from Grandt Line O-scale window castings. The walls will be covered with brick paper. It’ll also have a removable roof so I can eventually add interior detail.