A night at the Red Apron

A couple of weeks ago Debra received an invitation to the Red Apron's customer appreciation night on 4 November. Of course she signed-up - we couldn't pass up some excellent food and wine! One thing lead to another and Debra asked if we could bring the model for Jo-Ann and Jennifer to sign. They kindly agreed. 

[It was a packed house on customer appreciation night]

I had planned to re-start the Grizzly Flats depot, but with the event only a week away I embarked on a crash course to detail and light the model so it was presentable.

I added an LED light strip to the ceiling and soldered on a 9 volt battery clip for power. That's a length of styrene glued 90-degrees to the lights to form a valance to prevent a hot-spot from appearing in the windows. The inside surface of the valance was painted flat aluminum to help reflect the light down. The insides were 'detailed' with interior photos of the Red Apron sourced from the internet, scaled down to approximately HO size, and then stood up and glued inside. 

[Base about halfway though painting]

A base was cut and painted from 0.040 inch sheet styrene to simulate the sidewalk, and a variety of figures were added to provide some action. The chairs are Faller items, and the flowers and pots are from Busch (part # HO 1209 - they're excellent, but I needed extra steady hands and my extra strength magnifier to assemble them). I also added a model of Debra's car parked on the side driveway. It'll be the subject of a future post. When finished, the entire diorama was set inside a clear acrylic box designed for use with 1/24 scale model cars for easy handling and protection during the event.

[Ghost Cupcakes]

While in a model building frenzy to get this project done, Debra bought some Red Apron Ghost Cupcakes - it was Halloween - to soothe my nerves. It worked.

The model seemed to show well on the big night. Although to me, the excellent food and wine was the main attraction. Debra was great as the designated driver and model explainer. 

Jennifer and Jo-Ann were excellent hosts, put on a great event, and were sports enough to sign the roof. I'm not a shill or anything, but if you're in Ottawa, you can't go wrong to go down to the Red Apron and get some great food. 

[7 Nov. update: The model got a nice mention at the Red Apron blog.]

One convenience store down....

... and one to go.

The front steps are built up from pieces of 0.060 inch styrene sheet. Also, I added long strips of 0.010 inch styrene underneath the white brick strips to build out the front facade a little. These things were painted with a loose wash of gray, white, concrete, and a little black paint.

I didn't do any detailing on the back. Just added some doors. I might add some details later once I've decided on a place on the layout for it.

The roof is a piece of stucco textured styrene sheet painted with loose washes - mainly black. I just wanted something that suggested a roof, not anything highly detailed.

The roof isn't glued in place. It sits on a perimeter ledge and can be easily lifted out. I'm going to add some lights and photos to simulate interior detail. On this project I concentrated on the facade to try and learn more about making a '50s or '60s store front.

Convenience store update

Although we’re having an unusually fall-like summer due to a so-called ‘polar-vortex’ reaching down from the arctic,  when the real fall gets here I plan to get back to my layout to install a lot of lights and make a number of other changes. One is to add these convenience stores.

[The Walther's kit that is going to be turned into a Mac's Milk store. At this point the window and door unit has been successfully installed.]

I had separate threads for these two buildings, but given their similarity I thought I’d combine them.

[The main door on Le Tablier Rouge is inset from the facade. It's built from sheet styrene.]

I’ve added a street sign to the Tablier Rouge. It’s rather simple and is just a printout of a photo that’s been installed in a rectangular frame made from painted styrene shapes. There’s a piece of clear plastic over top of the printout to give it a glossy finish. It’s not lit. I’d like to add some photos of an actual store interior to the Rouge’s and light it. As well, there’s still a bit of work that needs to be done on the façade to add steps and unify the finishes.

[That little peg in the lower left corner - and his brother on the other side - were mismatched with the holes on the window and door unit preventing it from being installed.]

The Walther’s store kit is dead simple, but there was one annoying quirk I stumbled across while trying to install the façade’s window unit. The pegs molded into the front brick part of the façade don’t line up with the corresponding mounting holes in the window piece. Once the pegs were ground off, the window unit fit just fine, and the corresponding clear plastic overlay installed ok too.

[Here is the window and door unit installed after the the pegs were ground off.]

Le Tablier Rouge is now a box

Progress is hideously slow on this project, but at least with the facade glued on, it’s starting to look like a store - albeit an abandoned one at this point. I need to speed up and make it look inhabited before squatters take up residence.

The brick walls are standing

By this time I was hoping to have started building a model of one of Thaddeus Lowe’s electric railcars based on the Stanton drive. It turns out I had a problem with the drive when I was testing it. It comes wired from the factory for DC use so that you can place it on the rails of a DC system and it’ll go. When I placed it on my DC test track it ran haltingly and required frequent coaxing from ‘the-hand-of-god’ to help it along. Cleaning the track again didn’t improve things. On what would turn out to be its last run, a thin plume of smoke came from the housing as it sat and refused to move. I immediately shut off the power and that was that. I sent the remains back to the manufacturer. I don’t know if it was defective, or if I did something very wrong, but I’ll post an update when I know more.

So, I’ve decided to try and finish up some projects that are languishing on my table. I started the Le Tablier Rouge back in the winter and it’s been side-tracked a few times. But, recently I glued a piece of clear plastic behind the front façade to give it some ‘glass’; the side walls were painted a mixture of white and gray; some service doors were cut into the back wall. After that I glued a few 2mm x 2mm styrene strips to the back wall and floor, and then proceeded to glue the brick walls to the floor to get the shell to stand-up. I should have added more bracing to the walls before raising them, but I wanted to get things upright in order to see progress. I figured if I could see the walls standing, I’d be motivated to continue with the build in a more speedy fashion :-) I can always add more bracing later.

Walls

I tore a page from the Jack Webb playbook and renamed this project to protect the innocent; meaning it's now called 'Le Tablier Rouge'. Names aside, with everyday life looming large, I've used my model building time mainly on Caleb's Cabbage Co., but I've tried to squeeze in a little progress on this store. The blanks for the other walls have been built-up from embossed brick sheet with a plain 0.030 inch styrene strip along the bottom for the concrete foundation. I've also added some brick and stone sheet pieces on the front facade. There's lots of work still to go on this one.

Starting a mid-20th century vintage store

I think the thing I like most about streetcar layouts may be their biggest drawback for some: they’re urban and need lots of buildings. I grew up in Toronto where streetcars have been in continuous operation since what seems like the dawn of time – well, since the horse-drawn streetcars of 1861 to be more precise - so to me they aren’t relics of a pre-WWII North America. It’s easy to imagine streetcars of various vintages traveling through streets with buildings of many eras – that whole retro-future, all time periods existing simultaneously thing. This being the case, the building that houses The Red Apron in Ottawa struck me as a generic 1960s storefront common to Ontario – attractively remodeled for 21th century use – that might not be too hard to build and look right at home with some streetcars cruising by. The food’s great there too!

Here are a couple of photos of the prototype.

[The left part...]

[... and the right part]

The building procedure is going to be low-tech; much like Vivien Thompson used for the 4mm scale tram models in the Sept ’73 issue of Model Railway Constructor. The façade will be built up in three layers: an inner ‘glass’ layer of clear plastic, a middle layer of 0.012 inch thick styrene with window and door frames, and an outer layer of styrene pieces and brick papers for the brick and masonry. These days this project could no doubt be more accurately produced using photo manipulation and graphics software, and some sort of laser cutter or 3D printer, but the cost of all that seems a little high for a pastime – and kind of takes the fun out of it for me.

I started by drawing the middle layer of the facade on a piece of 0.012 inch styrene using the photos for estimating dimensions. I assumed the doors were 3’ wide by 7 ‘ tall and used that to dimension the other components.

Once all the lines were done, I cut out all the window openings with a sharp knife and a steel ruler. 

The facade was then cut free from the rest of sheet.