It took nearly 13 years ...

 ... but the sign was finally installed at Stella's. Invited or not, if you have a ghostly urge for used records, pop over to Stella's ....

Record bins installed at Stella's

The record bins and checkout counter were installed in Stellas along with the LED light unit. I just need to add some stuff on the counter, like a cash register and maybe some loose records, a few customers, a cat, and that should wrap things up. Although, on the outside I still need a sign and some ads in the windows of the 'We buy good used vinyl' variety. 

That reflection in the upper level? The big giant hand of course :-)

New stock of records

I surprise myself sometimes. I got up Sunday morning, put on some coffee, and decided to cut some records. Well, make some record sleeves for Stella's.

So yeah, I took an impressionistic approach, cut up some coloured paper into squares, 4mm on each side, and then glued them into the bins.

This is a shot midway or so through the process.

Over on the left is the partially depleted record pile. I didn't cut enough on the first go-round, and had to cut an additional pile of about the same size. Those bins hold a surprising number of records.

As well as records, I cut some pieces of file folder into 5mm x 4mm rectangles to act as bin index cards. They were inserted randomly to give the impression that Stella took the time to identify artists. 

Speaking of surprises, a few months ago I bought a copy of Bill Evans' Waltz for Debby on vinyl. I have a copy on CD, but now that I'm a certifiable vinyl snob, I wanted to find out if I could hear the difference between the vinyl and CD versions. Well, one thing lead to another and I only opened the album on the weekend. I found that inside the sleeve was a Ray Charles greatest hits album! Awesome indeed, but I was in the mood for some BE. Lesson Learned: Open The Album As Soon As I Get Home. In case you were wondering, here is Waltz for Debby:

A&A's on the drawing board

I've set the Natural History Museum aside for awhile now that main construction is over. I'm going to leave the roof and interior detailing for whenever it's time to place the building on the layout. 

I've been hearing A&A Records call me and I can't resist. Last summer about this time I made a cardboard mockup in HO, and now, a year later, I want to try and build up the facade. From the internet I found a photo and have worked on adjusting it to be close to HO by comparing figures that are near the front windows with some in HO scale. Right now I'm working on creating a scaled drawing and figuring out how to build the various components.

I pulled Stella's from the shelf to reminisce and figure out what remains to finish it - I've had high hopes for this, but it's never set my imagination on fire. Those are the record bins and cash desk. I've added some posters and indexing since I last worked on them. Maybe I'll get the urge to add records, or maybe I'll just listen to Sheryl Crow :-)

Go ahead, soak up the sun, I dare you :-)

A few days ago I was wandering through the grocery store looking for oatmeal, Muzak lulling me into a stupor. Then Sheryl Crow’s Soak Up the Sun came on. Now, I like to think of myself as a sophisticated music snob, no fluffy pop for me thank you very much, but I stopped dead in my tracks when I heard her. I mindlessly stared at some gluten-free cardboard thing masquerading as food while my brain went into automatic and shot life affirming goodness all throughout my neocortex. I was instantly happy. Snob or not, I can’t argue with that.

So, I buy my stupid oatmeal, go home and go straight to youTube. Ah. 

Then I look it up on Wikipedia and find this,

The lyrics describe first the singer's experience of exclusion from revolutionary leftist organizing, then the alienation she experiences as a laborer in a capitalist, consumer culture. The singer then cynically suggests mental illness may be responsible for humanity's continued participation in these dysfunctional systems.

Good grief. Here I am thinking it’s merely some naive, new agey, hippy, surfy*, feel good song about trying to be happy in the moment with what you’ve got, but it’s actually trying to subvert our entire capitalist culture ;-) But, forget about Groucho Marx for a minute, here’s all I need to know,

I don't have digital

...

I'm gonna soak up the sun

Got my 45 on

So I can rock on

And where can you get those 45s? Stella’s Used Records and Starlight Yoga Studio of course. It’s been in a forlorn, unusable, unloved, neglected condition for years (!) now. While I’m fixing stuff up, I figured I should fix it up too. Maybe by the end of the summer it'll be in business.

Ok, I’m a sluggard, but I went ahead and built the most important part of any record store: the record bins and cash desk. They need some more work, but at least the basics are done.

Excuse me comrade while I look for my sunscreen.

---

*Let me say that surfers do know one thing that has model railroading potential: build surfboards. 

Go to Google and search on: how to build a wooden surfboard. You’ll see something like these images.

Maybe there is something there for the layout builder to learn from.

Wall Decals

It was looking like the only way I was going to get crisp, clear lettering on an intensely red background for the WSMoftheWBB was to buy a new higher-end printer that sported a place for a pure red ink cartridge. I didn’t want to spend any more money on this project, so I decided I’d go with what I had and try to blend the wall decaling in with paint. 

The end result was a somewhat run-down look at street level. Toronto being a rather gritty city, this wasn’t too far out of place in the overall scheme of things even though it wasn’t prototypically accurate for this building. I once had a painting teacher who said that a painting has to hold together on its own because the typical viewer has never seen the actual object that you’re painting, so if you need to do something that deviates from the object to make the painting work, that’s fine. I think the same applies to model building. 

I’ve got decaling on my mind these days and since I was at it I decided to try another idea I’d been toying with: the addition of a simple mural to the back wall of Stella’s Used Records. I bought a boxed set of Bill Evan’s Village Vanguard recordings last winter in a remainder bin and I thought the cover image would be a great piece of HO graffiti – well, I’d be impressed if I walked down a street and saw it sprayed on a building :-)

I scanned the image, scaled it to fit the wall, and printed it on a piece of Micro Mark clear decal sheet. The image was fixed with a few sprays of Tester’s Dullcote. The decal was set on the wall with several applications of Micro Sol decal setting solution. 

A little more about Stella's

In my last post about Stella's I lead with a picture of the front of the building in it's position on the layout. It was a bit blocked by a foreground building, so I thought I'd take a picture of the building by itself.

 The picture above shows Stella's during gluing of the styrene pieces used to trim the windows and corners.

I found that there was a lot of static electricity build-up that attracted dust and dirt to the structure. Before final assembly I washed it with soap and water and let it dry on the sideboard - the liquid refreshment came later :-)

I'm fiddling around with ideas for a sign. I have some blank CDs with labels that make them look like old 45 rpm records. These might make for something interesting.

Here is a cut CD trial fit to Stella's It'll overhand the track, allowing streetcars to pass underneath. I'll keep playing with this one for awhile.

Upper floors at Stella’s completed

I finally finished the second and third floors at Stella’s.  This seemingly easy project has taken me a long time to complete, and I had to ‘cheat’ to continue to make progress.

I had based the look of the upper floors on a building I drive by everyday on my way to work. The problem was I wasn’t liking the way the model was turning out, and I developed a mental block that kept me from progressing – I was stuck on this one idea about how the model should look. Also, I had sprayed the outer panels the same colour as the Oceanview Hotel, and when I placed Stella’s on the layout, it didn’t look right with the hotel nearby – they matched too much.

'Eventually I remembered to go back to the book space: Japanese Design Solutions for Compact Living by Michael Freeman. It’s one my favourite books to browse through, and the picture of corner angle by Yoshiaki Yamashita (pg 114) was also an early inspiration for Stella’s – it gave me the idea of putting a new ‘top’ on an ‘old’, or pre-existing, base. Originally I thought Stella’s would be something of a hybrid between this Japanese building and the Canadian one I see every day. I guess in the end, it tilted more to the Japanese prototype.  I changed Stella’s paint scheme to black, and added a lot of aluminum-painted styrene framing to outline the windows and edges. This got me back on track.

[Facade of corner angle in space, pg. 114]

The roof panel, and the ground floor ceiling – which also forms the floor for the second level – are removable, and the upper floor unit isn’t glued to the ground floor, but is simply press fit into place so that I can later add interior detail and lighting. For now, the second and third floors were outfitted with black cardboard view blockers.

The box that forms the upper floors is very structurally strong, and I attribute this to using Ambroid ProWeld on the joints. I learned about if from this excellent youTube video on building with styrene.

I’m going to set Stella’s aside while I think of signs to add.

Upstairs at Stella's takes shape

I've lined the inside window frames with a thin, black Sharpie pen, and the walls have been glued together to form the basic box shape of the 2nd and 3rd floors.I used Ambroid Proweld glue and it worked quite well. I taped together the acrylic walls, made sure everything was square, and then ran Proweld along the joints. After around 10 or 15 seconds the structure was very solid. I then cut a piece of 0.080 inch styrene for the third floor. The same gluing technique was applied to the floor: it was slipped into place and Proweld was run along the joints. Once dry this all makes for a very solid structure.

Those pieces below are the panels that will be glued over each side of the 'glass' box. Various other window and roof details will be built up on them.

Construction resumes at Stella's

Well, I know it doesn't seem like much, but I've figured out how to proceed with the construction of the upper floors at Stella's, and the place to start was with drawing the side and end elevations. These will be transfered to the clear plastic walls, and styrene strips will be glued on to build up the window frames.

Ground floor renovations at Stella’s

One of the very first things to do was fill in the interior dimples in the walls left behind by the molding process. I don’t think the buildings in this line of products were ever meant to have full interiors, just some decoration inside the windows to give an illusion of one, so the insides are pretty sparse. And, frankly, I’m not going to do a full refurb job on the interior, just enough to suggest to a brief glance that something is going on inside. Nothing contest grade here.

Once the holes were filled and sanded flush, a floor was cut from styrene and glued inside the ground floor opening. Super glue was used to hold it in place. It was then on to some painting.
And the painting was actually rather enjoyable. I was getting the sense this was going to be a fun project. Successive layers of paint were starting to make this one pop. I won’t go into the details, but I hope the pictures tell the tale. I tuned up the shading on the brick, and used some thin red washes to enhance some of the exterior wood moldings.

One design element I had to decide on at this stage was where to put the stairs to get to the upper floors. After some humming and hawing, I figured they’d go against the back wall, and I’d add an interior wall to block the staircase from full view via the main windows. All one can see from a secondary end window are the stairs leading up to the yoga studio. I added a door at the end of the stair wall to suggest a small storage room, or stairs to a basement.

The windows were a bit tricky. As I mentioned, I didn’t want to do a full interior detailing and build out the interior window frames visually suggested by the exterior window framing. In the end, I simply cut a piece of clear plastic for each window, drew a ‘frame’ along it’s perimeter with silver and black Sharpie pens to simulate some sort of aluminum frame, and then superglued it over the window opening. It’s serviceable.

A service counter, record bins, and lighting will finish off the ground floor, but I think I’m going to do those details later and move onto building the upper floors.

Stella’s Used Record Store & Starlight Yoga Studio: Demolition and Renovation

[I temporarily tilted up the ‘glass’ walls for this shot to see how things looked. One wall was a little too tall and had to be cut down to size.]

I started assembling the Design Preservation corner building kit several years ago, but lost interest midway during construction and went on to other projects. It’s sat in a forlorn, semi-finished state in various locations in the workshop ever since. I eventually realized the problem I had was with the second story. I didn’t like it. It seemed too old, but the ground floor was quite interesting. I’ve been thinking for a long time about cutting the second floor off, and adding a more modern glass-and-steel upper level as a replacement to create a hybrid old and slightly newer building. I finally decided to give it a try. These days I’ve got a lot of ideas for various projects kicking around in my mind – good thing they’re not wearing cowboy boots! – and I figured that if I took my usual plodding approach to building one project after another in serial fashion, I’d barely see any of them realized. So, I thought I’d just make a start on any project that was interesting whenever the mood struck me, and I’d work on any project on the bench that seemed fun to do. This might be wasteful because something(s) is (are) likely never to get finished, but maybe that’s better than never starting them at all and wondering how they might have turned out. Anyway, I thought I’d collect up some pictures of progress I’ve made on this one over the last few weeks.

[After: The second story was cut off using both a disk cutter in my dremel and a razor saw. After it was free, I leveled the top of the first floor walls with the dremel drum sander and sanding sticks.]

[The upper story walls cut from 1/16 inch clear acrylic sheet. This is tough stuff to cut. Basically, you need to score it with a special knife made for the job, and then snap it along the score. Easy to write, harder to do well and safely. I usually break or mangle the piece I’m trying to cut, but I vowed not to do that this time. The mistake I made in the past was to try and hold the piece steady with one hand and use the other to score it. Bad idea on both the accuracy and safety fronts. This time I clamped the piece onto my WorkMate with an aluminum straight edge running along the line to be scored. This makes scoring a deep, uniform line easy, and you can keep your other hand free and clear without running the risk of getting a nasty gash in the process.]

[Once the piece is scored, you can snap it by laying the scored section over a piece of ABS pipe and then smartly pushing down on either side of the line. Presto! A clean break! After I got the hang of the whole process, I was able to easily separate the pieces and get a clean edge at the break simply by snapping the piece with my hands.]

I think one great thing about a streetcar layout is that it allows for many sorts of buildings and locales since the route should service all kinds of places people might go to: homes, libraries, businesses, restaurants, factories, schools, stores, hotels, clubs, parks, ski hills, beaches and so on and so on. For the model builder I think it offers lots of opportunity to try building all sorts of stuff; both replicas and new things. With Stella’s, the first floor will be the used record store, and there will be 2 glass and steel floors above that one: one for the yoga studio, the other’s use is still to be determined.

[The inside surface of the first floor walls have many small indentations – I guess they are from the molding process. I filled them in so I’d get a clean surface to work with.]

[This is where Stella's might finally reside.]

That’s it for now. Here’s a little of the Bill Evans’ Trio to finish off the evening: