"A Tale of Three Buildings - Tri-City Laser Inc/Knuckleduster" Topic

I acquired three more buildings from Knuckleduster for my town of Calamity. These are manufactured by Tri-City Laser Inc. Like their other buildings, these are pretty straight forward to build but some instructions for the more complex buildings and furniture would be a nice addition. The interior stairs for the Hotel didn't go together right and I spent way to much time fixing them. Basically the angle of the banisters don't match the angle of the stairs, nor is it actually long enough to run from the back top edge to the bottom front edge. It find it really irritating because I really like this building. There are photos on my blog: link
And if you don't want to go there, here are some pics of the finished buildings:

Mighty Purdy.

I love that – the integral base is a great addition.

And some mightyimpressive looking assembly tool too!

Good lookin' stuff. I just wish Lee would use MDF, as I hate the wood. He is pretty damn good with that laser machine (he's essentially a one-man show designing the stuff).

I was hoping that the plywood would let me use some of my model railroad weathering techniques but my favorites won't work because the grain on the plywood is so course. At this point I wish he would go with MDF as well.

How do you plan to paint these? I have found with the MDF kits that I can prime them with GW Skull white and then airbrush the large surfaces. The results are good and no detail is lost at all. I should post some pics soon.
sky

At the moment the plan is to prime white, use Rit dye and liquitex inks as the basecoat. This will be the surface color for the unpainted walls so 3/4 of the building should be done at this point. On the fronts where I want to have weathered paint I'll either use hairspray or dab on rubber cement then airbrush the main color over that. Then you use an eraser or other tool and rub the areas where you applied the hairspray or rubber cement revealing the original weathered wood color underneath. I'm sure there will be some experimentation involved to get the process down and looking right. Then some more weathering on top that with my weathering powders, then seal the whole thing up.
Some one mentioned on another forum that he thought buildings were over weathered. Its true that many western towns went up, literally, overnight. It wasn't unusual for a town to pack up everything, including the buildings, and move to another location either. Garfield City Colorado is an example of this, it was literally moved, lock, stock and barrel, to Alamosa Colorado. The western climate is harsh on buildings and new wood doesn't look new for very long out here, so weathering all of your buildings is definitely appropriate, but a few newer buildings will give an air of prosperity as well.

Heisler, I'll get in touch with Lee and see if I can't convince him to try MDF. He does MDF stuff (he frequently does special stuff for me). I'll see what I can swing!

HeIsler , I came across your blog and was fortunate enough to aquire some of the old style buildings…These are now discontinued and scarce…What are the weights that you used & Ist possible to buy them…?

The first set of those came from Micro Mark and are called precision 1-2-3 blocks. I don't remember where the second pair came from but they came in their own orange case. There are a variety of sources for them if you do a google search for Precision 1-2-3 Blocks.

Thankyou sir , this will help immensely…