N Scale Office Furniture

Do you know what you can't buy in N Scale?

Office furniture.

Park benches? Yes!
Japanese food stands? Yes!
Oktoberfest details? Yes?
Office furniture? No.

Its as if the N Scale world excludes any 'white color' occupations! Which is a shame really, because Kato, Tomix, and Greenmax have really done some great N Scale buildings (1/150 scale at least) with big wide, modern looking windows which - to my eye - look somewhat naked with nothing going on 'inside'! One creative solution is to add various window treatments (I think there are some commercially available products out there that allow you to fill windows with illustrations, etc..), or to 'blur' them with some spray paint technique (dullcoat or specific products for this from hardware stores).

These approaches work okay for some buildings....the Vollmer and Kibri kits come with a pre-printed color sheet of paper that you insert into the building behind the windows which actually looks convincingly like drapes and window coverings when backlit with lighting. And for larger buildings, I've gone with a more 'suggestive' approach of blacking out some windows, and 'fogging' the rest with some 'glass fogging' spray paint from the hardware store. But these approaches don't work great for all of the buildings, so its time to get creative.

I decided I would create my own N scale office cubicles to fill some of the floors of my modern office structures (which, of course, are brightly lit). This was actually a pretty simple and easy exercise.

The simplest method I came up with requires two basic materials: A 1/2" or 12mm wide strip of styrene, and a 90 degree corner piece of styrene.

The flat styrene is cut to make squares or rectangles of slightly less than 1/2" or 9mm, and then cut a piece of the 90 degree styrene corner piece to 10-12mm (again, about a half inch or less). Then glue the corner piece end to the face of the flat styrene 'square' piece so that it is flush on the edge. The picture shows this better than I can explain it!

Once you've assembled a decent batch of these things (after all, a sole 'cubicle' is kind of a contradiction), I set them on a strip of masking tape and gave them a nice coat of a nuetral, boring color appropriate for the modern office environment.

Given all the excess stickers I find with the above mentioned Kato, Tomix, Greenmax kits, I use these stickers to add some color to the cube walls.

Wallah! Now that you have your cube, get to work! :-)

Okay wait, something's missing! Where do our little N Scale yuppies sit! This was a harder one for me to figure out, and I don't think the end result is as convincing as I wanted. Nevertheless, I used some Styrene I-beams, and cut them into about 1/8 inch pieces (or 4mm). I then used my trusty Xacto knife to carve the top portion into a U shape (which will be the 'seat') and gave a little trim to the center of the I-beam to hide the I-beam look. Is it a chair? Well, they lack backs and arms, but if a figure is glued to it, its unlikely that will be significant except to the most discerning eye. But did I succeed? I don't know. I think I've created the first scale model of toilets more than anything!

The proof is in the pudding (whatever that means), and when its all put together, I think it turned out okay.