Palace Theatre, Toronto, 1940s

Another street scene found during genealogical scanning. This time it's Danforth Avenue, not too far from the corner of Danforth and Pape. On the right is Toronto's famous Palace Theatre. And as an added bonus, the streetcar tracks are visible in the centre of the road :-)

Workbench Scenes: Fire hydrants & Parking meters

Fire hydrants & parking meters being painted.

The layout needs a lot of 'street stuff' to make it credible: mailboxes, sewer grates, manhole covers, trash cans, newspaper boxes, street signs, traffic signs, fire hydrants, phone booths, parking meters, bike racks, and so on and so on. One or two of these things won't do; it would be like a 'forest' with just one or two trees. I need these things in bulk. 

I found some 8 packs of fire hydrants made by Atlas that looked pretty close to those along some TTC routes of interest, so I bought a couple packs. Along with some miscellaneous ones I already owned - which can be used to represent hydrants along older streets - I think I'll have enough hydrants to make the layout seem like it has at least rudimentary fire protection :-) The 6 parking meters are Walthers items I found in my spares box. Ocean Boulevard isn't open to automobile traffic - much like King St. - so the meters will be installed on side streets. No, I won't be modelling HO scale change for a dollar :-)

Workbench Scenes: N gauge test track

Kato powered chassis zooming around test loop.

I was rooting around in the crawl space and came across my old lumpy loop N gauge test track I used to test the EVRR loco and cars. The loop was in a bit of a sorry state, so I decided to clean it, fix it, and give it a try with my N scale fleet to see how they were running - and for a bit of simple fun :-) Fleet is a grand word for a Bachmann 0-6-0 loco, a TTC PCC streetcar, and a Kato 11-104 powered chassis. Luckily the 'fleet' still worked, so I polished all the members up a bit with a dusting off and lubrications all round. It's nice to see these running.

A thin background building

I've been playing around with ideas for background buildings for use in photos. Over there is my first attempt at making one.

The model is basically a box glued up from scrap pieces of foam board, and then papered with a photo of a section of a high rise apartment. 

I didn't make any attempt to have a proper ground floor, or any variation in the wall pattern as would be appropriate for different levels. I'm assuming that in most photos I'll take with this in the background the bottom floors will be obscured by models in the foreground. 

This building can either stand on the layout behind a model, or be attached to a tripod so it can be placed some distance behind the layout to enhance the illusion of depth.

The tripod mount is made from a piece of metal strapping bent into an L-shape

The metal L is glued and duct taped to an inside wall. 

The box's walls are a bit off square, but after papering, and when positioned for photographing, this isn't noticeable.

This model is more-or-less a test article for these kinds of buildings, and I see several areas for improvement.

The photo used for the wall was sized a little too small, so this model needs to be placed a little further back behind the models than in this test shot. Background buildings close to the models need their features scaled a little smaller than the foreground items, but not as small as in this test building.

The tripod attachment works ok, but it's a little wobbly once on the tripod, and needs to be improved. 

So, promising, but improvements are needed.

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.