Thrifty's is open for business!

Cold weather, snow, and a lockdown have helped me keep building. Over the weekend I took the opportunity to finish Thrifty's Yonge St. store.

Although they can't be seen in the opening photo, there are 2 dormers on the upper floor. It's some sort of mansard roof up there, along with 2 arched top dormers facing the street.

My dormers are based on window castings from Tichy Train. The ones I had in my spares box had many more mullions than the prototype, so most had to be cut off. Once that was done, two vertical mullions were cut for each window frame from 0.010" thick styrene and glued in place.

The dormers were laid out on 2-ply Strathmore Bristol board. These are basically the structural backings for each of the windows. 

The angles for the dormer side walls are measured from the drawing.

The dormer side walls are folded up once each piece is cut out. I used a scriber to etch the fold lines before cutting out the pieces.

 

The window frames were glued to the dormer walls, and then the complete assembly was glued to the wall on the uppermost floor. These units were painted black and outfitted with clear plastic windows prior to installation.

The semi-circular dormer roofs are cut from 3x5 card. You'll notice that these dormers are not exact replicas of the prototype. They're simplified representations. As they're not the focus of the model, I didn't feel like spending much time on them, and that entire area on the prototype is painted black, so there wouldn't be much to see anyway.

I papered the upper floor wall with self-adhesive block paper from Micro-Mark as I thought it had a nice texture that would work well up there. The problem turned out that the texturing was a little too subtle, and was mostly obliterated once painted flat black. Live and learn. 

The upper edge of the main wall was built up from pieces of card and balsa. Once all the elements were glued in place the whole thing was painted flat black.

The decorative fence along the top of the facade is made from Atlas' HO-scale keyhole fencing from my spares box. I'll replace it if I come across something a little more decorative - and cheap :-)

The interior is a picture of a jeans store interior I found on the internet - it isn't representative of the Thrifty's store in the '80s.

On many other builds I'd have separate light boxes for the main sign and the interior. This time I decided to use 'ambient' light and simply put a light on the underside of the roof and have it illuminate both areas.

Last year I bought some LED button lights from Amazon for the Canadian Press complex. I had one left and stuck it to the underside of the roof. It has a built in battery and an on-off switch. It'll conk out one day and need replacement - we'll see how long that takes.

One obvious problem with this approach is that the sign's interior structure, along with some internal balsa stiffeners cast a shadow on the inside upper part of the main sign, so illumination is not quite uniform. Doesn't look too bad, but it's not perfect.

I didn't spend anytime detailing the sides or back. As mentioned in a previous post, they were just covered with brick paper so they didn't look too odd.

Well, that's that. It didn't take as long as many projects I've undertaken, but it wasn't as fast as I had hoped. Small steps I guess.

Thrifty's box

Building up the walls and gluing them into the basic box structure that is Thrifty's was rather fun. I think it's because I haven't built a model from card and wood in awhile, and the change from plastics was refreshing.

Some preparation was required before the walls could be assembled.

The window and door frames in the entry were cut from a piece of 2-ply Strathmore 500 series Bistrol board, as was the entry's roof. The side walls are pieces of 4-ply. 

Prior to assembly the entry pieces were blackened with a Sharpie pen. At this point, as you can see in the photo, there is a roughness to some of the window frames that had to be cleaned up with a sharp knife. 

Once that was done, a piece of thin clear plastic was used for the glass and attached to the back of the window and door frame with transfer tape.

The entry was then built up and glued into place in the front wall opening. 

On the left side of Thrifty's, the prototype photos show some sort of recessed area. It isn't clear what it is, but I interpreted it to be a door, maybe to an office or stairs up to the top level. I built up this recessed area from balsa strips and card, using a simple Tichy Train casting for the door.

One other thing I should point out about the facade is that originally I tried to fold the sloped roof face - where the dormers are attached - into shape so the facade could be made from a single piece of card. It turns out the topmost 1' strip on the roof face had to be cut off from the facade piece for the front wall to accurately attach to the side walls - the 4-ply card was just too thick to get a crisp crease that would allow the lower roof fold to fit gap-less to the side walls.

The walls required reinforcement. I have a lot of balsa strips in my scrap box from projects I intended to start, but never did. Those 1/4" square pieces were bought a few years back with the good intention of using them to build a 1/24 scale model of E. L. Moore's Cal's Lumber Yard. It got as far as cutting one wall from Gatorboard, but then was overtaken by events. Anyhow, it left me with some strips of balsa, a few of which I cut up and Weld Bonded to the inside walls of Thrifty's as stiffeners.

Although Weld Bond was used more-or-less everywhere to stick things together, when it came time to glue the walls into a box, I used 3M transfer tape. That stuff grabs fast and there's no mess. I figured I'd give it try on holding the walls together.

Over on the right I'm showing a piece of transfer tape applied to a side wall end edge. When ready for assembly, that piece of carrier paper is peeled back to expose the glue strip. 

The nice thing about transfer tape is there's no potential for mess during assembly, and the bond is basically instantaneous, so there's no clamping and waiting for glue to dry.

You can see in this image some brick paper on a side wall. Both sides and the back had brick paper glued on before building up the box. I used Superquick brick paper as it's quite thin. 

And that's that for the basic structure. I'm thinking of having a go at the dormers next.

A drawing and walls for Thrifty's

When I do a drawing for a model building its purpose is to help me understand the sizes, shapes, and positioning of the various items that make up the structure. It isn't meant to be a work of art, or to be complete.

I'll often do two drawings like I did here: the first one is rough and is to help me figure out what will be included in the model, and the second is a more properly scaled and sized layout. On the second one I've positioned the plastic mouldings that I'll be using to check their fit.

I do pencil drawings only because they give me a sense that I understand the project when I'm done. I don't get that feeling from a CAD package. It's just a personal thing.

I wanted to do things differently for this project for no other reason than to have a change, so I'm making this model primarily from card instead of plastic. The walls are cut from Strathmore 500 series 4-ply Bristol board. I bought a few sheets of Strathmore 500 series in various thicknesses on a trip to the US back before the pandemic as I haven't seen this material for sale here. The photo shows the walls being laid out in a long strip on the 4-ply.

Given the thickness of the material, I decided to cut out each wall in order to build them into a box instead of scoring the wall edges and folding the strip into a box. I don't think the folding method would produce sharp corners with material this thick.

The next step will be to add reinforcements to the inside wall surfaces, and to build the pieces into a box.

Preparing Thrifty's sign

On this project the sign is the most prominent and most important element. So, I went ahead and built it so I could use it as a guide to sizing and positioning the building's other elements.

The first thing I did was discard my previous sign printout as I thought the yellow background colour was a little too lemony. I printed another where the yellow was shifted a bit more to a golden yellow-orange shade.

The sign's frame was built up from strips of 0.040" styrene. After painting the frame flat black, the sign was glued on with Weld Bond, and then a clear piece of plastic was glued on top. A black Sharpie pen was used to ink a frame on the clear piece.

The sides have been sized to accommodate LED strips. They'll likely need some filtering so they don't create hot spots when lit. However, I'll leave LED installation to later as now that the sign structure is finished I can move on to creating a drawing for the facade, and laying out the building's main parts.

Starting Thrifty's

Images of Thrifty's on Yonge harvested from the internet

Thrifty's was a retail store that sold blue jeans. I think it had outlets throughout Toronto, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one shoehorned between A& A records and Sam the Record Man on Yonge Street. It's the sign I'm stuck on. I think it would be quite striking on the layout. 

The building Thrifty's was in wasn't always Thrifty's, but until sometime in the early '70s (?) it housed Steele's Tavern. I show Steele's here because it gives a little clearer view of the building's structure. This Thrifty's was eventually taken over by an extension to the neighbouring Sam the Record Man.

There's going to be considerable guess work in building this structure, but the key to sizing it is the sign. I worked up a draft sign in Keynote using standard fonts to get a sign that seemed to have the right size. From the sign, and comparisons to A&A next door, I should be able to approximate the size and shape of the Thrifty's store. 

Now, I say this all the time, but this time gosh darn it I mean it, I want this build to be quick :-) It's more-or-less all facade, so the rest will just be a box. The facade appears to be all black, other than the sign, so that simplifies things a bit. I'm thinking of using some sort of progression modelling on this project, so maybe that'll help speed things up.