The old bank on Bank houses a new business

The prototype of this old bank model that I started in October and November 2017 and finished in February and March 2019 (!) has a new business in it. 

You may recall that the photos I shot and built the model from were taken in July 2016 when the building was up for sale.

July 2016

It's quite a deep building even though the facade it presents to the street is rather compact.

July 2016

It's so long that I had to do some serious compression on the model so it wouldn't overpower the layout I was building at the time and fit into the overall scene.

In 2017 the building housed a furniture store.

September 2017

The building is now home to the Sofia Vintage Motor Café. I heard they were having some sort of showcase preview event there last Sunday, so I walked over. I also learned that the concept of the place would be vintage, with a vintage car or two inside while one drinks one's coffee. So, coffee and vintage cars, I couldn't resist.

It's now the Sofia Vintage Motor Café

While I was walking there I noticed an unusual number of Porsche 911s converging in-and-around the area. When I got there I saw why: many, many high-end cars were parked nearby and on display. Obviously the word had gone out; the place was mobbed. There was a line-up to get in and get coffee and hob-nob. I don't have the patience to stand in lines at the best of times so I took a pass and will visit again during a regular weekday. I'm very interested in seeing the interior and sampling the coffee!

That deep side has plenty of room to show off cars!

I'm glad to see the old bank is being used for a new business and I wish them well. 

In the spirit of this new business, if I ever stage another layout car show I'll be sure to include this little old bank.

One day billboard

Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a long time: built a model in one day (ok, it was a simple one) :-)

Rooftop billboards were fairly common in Toronto at one time, and the real estate on top of the bank of Nova Scotia building looked like it needed one.

The entire project was freelanced from studying some pictures and then gluing up a structure from various pieces of Evergreen styrene strip along with a small piece of 0.020" styrene sheet for the billboard's main surface.

The advertisement for radio station CFRA was scanned from their 3 May 1971 top 30 leaflet I found stashed away with some old papers, and then sized to fit the billboard. According to their top 30 for that day, Three Dog Night's Joy to the World was number 1, and Chairmen of the Board's Chairman of the Board clocked in at number 30; however, when it comes to model building I usually relate more to their other hit, Give me just a little more time.

Making a start on signs

I haven't been doing much model building over the last couple of weeks, but I have squeezed in a little time to make a start on signs for the buildings in the Canadian Press complex. The Quebec bank building on the left does have a hamburger place on the ground floor called Big Smoke Burger, which we've had great burgers at, so I copied the canopy sign from the prototype. It's just a paper and construction paper assembly. For the bank on the right, I painted up some plastic letters and glued them to the facade with Weld Bond. I think the prototype building was a Toronto-Dominion bank, but since the TD tower is down the street, I didn't want to have too many of the same company. Anyway, for some unknown reason, this little facade said bank of Nova Scotia to me, so that's what I went with.

On little annoyances

After sitting for a few months in the basement, the front door of the bank had developed a serious kink in the frame between the door and adjacent window. 

I've been trying to ignore it, but it gave me a bad twinge every time I glanced its way. For mental heath reasons I broke down and decided to fix it. I carefully clipped the bottom frame, sanded it back a bit, re-glued the frame into position, and finished off with a dab of paint. Although far from perfect, it now looks like a door that no one would give a second glance, let alone a mental twinge.

Back to Bank

I was going through some photos today and when I got to the bank pictures I started thinking this one was a bit better than the one I used in the post about finishing up that project. The building is a little more forthright and imposing in this head-on view.

The Corner Bank

So far this year I don’t seem to be getting much pleasure from model making or model streetcar stuff. To keep my hand in I’ve been doing a lot of reading, some writing, photo rummaging, and a little bit of lightweight modelling here-and-there to finish up some projects to see if there’s any spark. One of those little projects was to add windows, doors, and a roof to the bank I started way back in Nov ’17. It took a few weeks, but the basic external features are now in place, and it’s ready for lights and internal detailing.

I need to fix up that facing corner - the wash is a little too blobby.

But, the walls that nobody sees much aren't too bad. See that long side wall, I didn't run out of brick when I faced it, that's more-or-less what one sees when driving by. You can see the block section sticking out above the neighbouring building. I used creative license to fill in the lower wall. I could have bricked the whole thing and ignored modelling the blocked section, but I see the real building a lot in my travels and not modelling the block section wouldn't seem right. I know this isn't much of an issue, but it gets to the heart of model making: if you deliberately leave out things that signal something to you, maybe you should question what you're doing.

It was last summer I painted the walls. Inside, they were painted a sky blue and the floor was made grey. I haven't decided if this building will be a bank or something else. Originally the prototype was a Bank of Nova Scotia, and when I was a boy in Toronto, that chain of banks was where my mum set up my first savings account, so their old school sign has some sentimental meaning for me.

The roof is removable. It's just a piece of 0.060 styrene with a sheet of coarse sandpaper glued to it. Colours are my usual loose wash of greys and blacks. Not very prototypical, but I like the look.

I was looking at the photo of E. L. Moore's workbench again and thought I'd post a picture of my table with this project and Bert's Garage on-the-go. The bank is in the upper left, and Bert's walls are just above the cutting mat. Given the type of tools and materials I use, for all you know this could have been shot anytime between 1960 and now :-) Well, except for the 1980s vintage calculator which I should have replaced with a slide rule :-) Oh, and except for those post-it notes....darn....

Well, I’m hoping I’ll get my mojo back when spring finally arrives. I think the whole ‘winter is a great time for model making while the days are short and the weather outside is bad' thing is a myth, or it is for me. I don’t feel like doing much of anything in the winter, and feel like doing everything when summer rolls around. And that includes model making.

Last week, while contemplating when our 260cm of snow is going to melt, I was reading through the Wikipedia entry on Railroad Model Craftsman and was stopped in my tracks by this sentence in the section about RMC’s change in editorial direction as the ‘60s morphed into the ‘70s: Koester and Boyd worked together to push more modern prototype content and fine scale modeling features in contrast to the more loose interpretations of the hobby previously published by Hal Carstens. I was stopped by the phrase, more loose interpretations of the hobby. Intriguing. Given the rest of the Wikipedia discussion, I think the intent of loose interpretations was to say we’ve moved on from those wild-west days. And we have. But I think along with the advances, a lot of good stuff has been lost. I rather like that term loose interpretations. I need to think about it some more.

Bank on Bank

I was looking for a fairly easy and relaxing project I could work on for 10 or 20 minutes at a time, and soldering track work wasn't going to do it, so I thought I'd take a crack at a small HO scale building I'd been thinking about for awhile.

One night last year I was driving home from a movie and snapped that. I shouldn't have. I was driving. Well, I was stopped at the light if it makes you feel better.

It's an old bank at the corner of Glen and Bank street. A bank on Bank. Built in 1955. It was a Toronto-Dominion Bank I think. I've always admired this little building. Well, ok, it's not so little. Look at that long side facade.

Hate that white sign board someone stuck on top.

Today it's a furniture store and whoever owns it now took down that thing. 

It has a sense of solidity about it. It's not showy, but has a handsome simplicity. And it's basically just a decorated box, so I thought it would be easy to model. That's what I decided to do: build it. I want to build more brick and stone buildings and develop some ease in doing so, so this seemed like a good project to give it a try.

That upper photo of the facade is my estimate of being nearly HO scale, maybe a little bigger. From that, I figured out some dimensions. The facade is modelled without selective compression, but the side wall is considerably shortened, otherwise it would take up a lot of space on the layout. In the end the basic shape is very shoebox-like - a lot of buildings are.

I wanted thick walls, and each is made by gluing 2 pieces of 3/32" balsa together with their grains perpendicular to each other.

Each wall was left to dry overnight under a stack of books. I could have used foam board or styrene, but I had some balsa left over from a project I never got around to starting, and I have a well known E. L. Moore fixation :-) so the choice was obvious. 

These are the wall's inner surfaces. The end walls are notched on the sides so the side walls will fit snuggly.

The windows and doors are trimmed with what looks like concrete pieces. And there's that nice yellow brick. I was planning on using Micro-Mark's HO scale yellow brick like I used on The Bookery. I didn't have enough on hand and contacted Micro-Mark about ordering more and they broke the bad news: they no longer make it! And hadn't done so for a few years. So, all I had on hand was some red plastic brick sheets and decided to go with that and paint the whole thing once major construction was done.

For the concrete trim I had an empty box of instant oatmeal, so it was pressed into service.

I cut the trim pieces to 6" wide, which is probably a little wider than the prototype, but doesn't look too bad.

I waffled back-and-forth about whether I should decorate each wall before assembling them into a box, or glue up the box and then decorate. In the end I added a few pieces to the unassembled walls, then glued them into a box, and finished attaching the trim and brick sheets. Peeking inside you can see the styrene floor - I think it's 0.020 inch - that was glued in after the walls were assembled. I chose styrene only because it was the thinnest sheet material I had on hand.

After installing the floor, some additional balsa strips were glued into the corners for extra bracing. In retrospect, I think this is a bit of overkill.

The floor fits ok, although its got a little flex.

You can see that the side wall is much shorter than the prototype, but maintains its style. One thing that strikes me about this model is that if I didn't know the prototype, I'd say the model was in O scale given those large door and window openings. This would likely make a good O scale model of some sort, although it wouldn't have the impressiveness of the large windows in relation to the smaller people that HO does.

At this point I wanted to see how it would look on the layout. The sidewalks are yet to be installed, so things are looking a little bare. Also, I've got this whole thing I'm working out in my mind about making sure streets turn in the correct sequence to get to the various buildings from the sidewalks - it's a little convoluted and I think I'll do a post on what I'm considering is an important planning principle to me for streetcar layouts. Anyway, it doesn't look too bad on that corner.

From this point it was more-or-less just cutting and gluing pieces into location. A pleasant and relaxing task when done on a now-and-then basis.

One thing though. I need to do a little work on improving the corners where the brick sheets come together. The digital photos highlight a few problems.

The wall that butts up against the neighbouring building has a section where there appears to be no brick, just exposed concrete block.

To hint at that, I pieced in a section on the blank side wall with a piece of plastic HO block sheet. Well, that's phase 1, refinement, painting, detailing, lighting and all that good stuff is next.