Missed his car

Someone's late | Someone's depressed | Someone doesn't like the headlines

The first highrise is done! Hmmmm, well, I see a number of places that need some touchup to plug light leaks, but overall I'm happy with it. It's got the right feeling. I learned a lot about about what not to do as well as what to do on the next one.

The sign is glued together from 3mm styrene letters and a strip of 0.020" x 0.040" styrene for the base. I arranged the letters and strip on the sticky band of a post-it note. When everything was positioned, some liquid styrene bonder was carefully dabbed on. I should have used a steel ruler as the square edge, but luckily I didn't slop any bonder on the plastic ruler.

The revolving door is made from 2 pieces of clear plastic cut so that one slides inside the other at the centre.

The frame was drawn on with a black Sharpie pen. Four styrene strips were glued to the centre to stiffen the structure.

The unit is glued in place in the main entry. I had plans to make it turn, but couldn't pull that off. I'll give it a try again on the next highrise.

No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin' - Restin' while the glue dries on the sign over the revolving door

The structure over the main entry is built up from styrene and foam. The doors to either side of the revolving door are cut from 0.020" sheet styrene. I'm planning on getting a sheet cutter for my computer sometime this year, so pieces like those door frames should be easier to cut - and be more accurate - with the machine.

And there it is in all its early-70s glory. It's interesting how once the street-level doors and sign are added they force a scale onto this thing that's basically just a big box. 

The back wall is panelled with brick sheets and some details - phoney, non-prototypical details - were added just to make the wall less monotonous. To me the front and side walls, as well as the lobby, are what this building is about, so I wasn't too concerned with the back wall. Although, the back wall still slides out for eventual detailing of some floors, and to allow photos of the street to be taken from inside.

Lobby

Although I thought I'd defer any detailing of individual floors until I got to that stage with the Hartley Tower, I didn't think I could avoid adding the lobby. At the very least, the lobby floor would help add strength to the structure as did the roof and the upper floors, and help remove a little wall flaring at the base.

The lobby is rudimentary. It's just a floor, elevator block, ceiling, and some lights.

The panels are cut from 0.040" styrene. I looked up some marble and elevator door images on the internet, printed them on paper, and then glued the pieces to the styrene panels. I should have added things like elevator controls, floor numbers, and a directory, but I felt rushed and decided to delve into those details when I build the Hartley tower.

My lobby doesn't model what's in the prototype. It's just a mockup of my impression of the ones found in modern highrises: ones that use various types of marble and stainless steel. 

While I was building mine I watched the movie Towering Inferno - an Irwin Allen disaster classic from 1974. Early in the movie we see Roberts, the building's architect played by Paul Newman, elevatoring down from the helipad along with the building's developer, played by Willam Holden, and then entering what appears to be the lobby of developer's company offices. Wow! It's a symphony of burnt orange and earth tones, a far cry from the mausoleum aesthetic of my lobby. I'm keeping all that funky '70s style in the back of my mind when it comes time to detail the Hartley Tower.

Lighting is via a strip of LEDs housed in an overhead light box. There are some holes punched in the floor of the elevator box so the wires can leave the building. And a row of holes were punched into the ceiling below the light box to try to give uniform lighting across the marble expanse. 

It took a bit of fiddling to get the lobby inside, but in the end it fit snuggly. Some MEK-based solvent was used to bond the lobby to the structure.

The aluminum bar with the holes is a bar clamp I used to keep things stable and aligned as I glued everything in place.

And that's that for the lobby.

Next up, detailing the front and rear walls.

Sliding back wall

I built-up a sliding back wall for the highrise.

It's fairly easy to make. There're 3 layers: there's an inner piece of black mat board, a middle layer of 0.100" styrene strips to act as a spacer layer, and an outer layer of black foam board. There's a track on the back ends of the side walls - it's those white strips in the photo - made from 0.080" square styrene that the back wall slides into. In the photo the wall is partially slid up to reveal the lobby and lower floors, but the entire wall can be slid out to expose all the floors.

After pondering things a bit, I need to build up the lobby next so I can get the bottom of the building firmed up and detailed. 

The back wall isn't going to be left as raw foam board, but will be finished simply with styrene brick sheets and a few detail items. The details won't be prototypically accurate, just suggestive so that a casual glance isn't too jarring. 

Highrise structure cleanup

After staring at the model for awhile, I figured it needed a bit of strengthening here-and-there, and a little touch-up before moving on with new tasks.

A number of the glued joints were reinforced. A ceiling for the top floor was added as well as a roof cut from 0.100" styrene. I thought that floor didn't need a ceiling, and a roof was all that was required, but after viewing the top floor from a few angles it was clear that it would look unfinished without its own ceiling.

Also, the outside corner verticals were added since the wall joints looked and felt ok. While I was at it, I touched up some paint on a few other verticals that had gotten abraded.

Work on the back wall and exterior detailing are next. The model is standing on the corner of my desk with the open side toward me. I'm hoping that by looking around inside long enough I'll develop some ideas about interior detailing.

The tower stands!

I put the pedal-to-the-metal and got the sides panelled with horizontal and vertical elements using the same techniques used on the facade. Once done, I was quite anxious to get the 3 walls glued up and see this thing standing.

Gluing the walls together was a bit tricky. For the next highrises I'm going to need to build a jig to hold the walls in place as they're glued. This one was a bit of a juggling act, but things worked out ok.

The sides were glued to the facade - which is an acrylic to acrylic joint - with a thick superglue. Some kicker was carefully sprayed on the glue seam to speed bonding.

I decided to add interior floors to give extra strength to the structure, and to allow for some interior detail and lighting.

The floors are rectangles of black, 3/16" foam board, glued in place with Roket Card Glue by Deluxe Materials. 

The back wall is going to be able to slide out to allow for interior detailing, and for taking pictures of layout scenes. That wall will simply be a piece of foam board with some plastic brick sheets glued on. 

The real thing was finished construction in 1972, and when this little version stood up, and I had a good look, it was definitely reminding me of highrises from that era. So far, so good.

Verticals & horizontals installed

I finished gluing the remaining verticals and horizontal pieces to the Thomson facade. 

In the process I accidentally cut a column of horizontals too wide, and it left a glaring open gap. I had to replace an entire column of little black pieces, so I learned what it would take to individually install all those little black squares. 

But, once that repair was made, I could step back and see that the facade was shaping up ok. It was starting remind me of the real thing, which is the point of this.

I should note that unlike the horizontals and verticals on the test piece, after a few days a couple of vertical ends came unglued. However, over on the test piece, everything is still stuck on just fine. I carefully applied some thick super-glue under each loose end and then clamped the vertical to the blank. So far the offending verticals remain stuck down.

Highrise start

I've been doing some work here-and-there on building highrise facades. Although I've cut out the acrylic blanks for a few buildings, I decided to start building out the facade on the one that's based on the Thomson Building as it seems iconically '70s, and is relatively simple enough to allow me to try various techniques without too much heartburn.

The blank is cut from 1/8" lightly smoked acrylic sheet. The verticals are 5' wide pieces cut from mat board, and the horizontals, which are also 5' wide, are pieces of flat black construction paper. The verticals were painted with an aged concrete colour before installing.

The horizontals and verticals are held in place with transfer tape.

As you can see, before installing a vertical, a column of horizontal pieces have to be sliced away so the vertical can be bonded directly to the acrylic blank. This is a pain, but I thought I'd get a straighter horizontal this way. I think when I build up the sides, I'll install the verticals first, then the smaller horizontals on a piece-by-piece basis. 

Office buildings

Lines are a bit hard to see - try looking at the large view

There are a few '70s-style office buildings in Toronto that I'm rather partial to looking at, and I'm having a go at drawing up compressed variations of them for the OPL. I started with the Thomson Building on Queen W and the Canadian Press building on King. It's the strong geometrical patterns on their facades that gets my attention - I have no idea if they're any good to work in.

It may seem rather easy to draw up the facades, just get the dimensions and some photos and there you go. The problem is that even in HO scale these would each be a few feet tall and overwhelm the layout. 

After some thought I realized I need to establish some sort of vertical scale for the layout which boils down to:

1. The size relationships between the models reflects that of the prototypes even though the models themselves are much smaller than their real life counterparts. This means: the TD Centre , the tallest building on the layout, will be much taller than the Thomson Building, which is much taller than the Canadian Press building, which is taller than A&A, which is on the order of the Imperial Six, which are both in that middling height range that is currently the layout's norm.

2. The proportions of the buildings need to remain close to that of the prototypes even though this may result in fewer floors and narrower frontage than the prototype.

3. My TD Centre mockup is too short at 2' tall, and needs to be taller. It seems ok in N, but not HO. A true-to-scale TD Centre would be around 8' tall in HO, which is about the length of the entire layout! A model in the 3' to 4' range is laughable on its own, but in the context of the other compressed buildings - compressed in accordance with rule 1 - it'll look quite tall while still being short.

As I work on drawings of these buildings I'm struck by the idea that while buildings and street lengths have to be compressed, the streetcars and people are to-scale reproductions. Also, I find that roads and sidewalk widths, as well as building spacing, can't be overly compressed or things start to look too train-set like - over-compression of these negative spaces is always a scene-killer to me. That needs to be its own post: how the size, shape, and use of negative space is one of the most neglected aspects of layout design.