High Rise Kit: Stump Tower aka "The Rhodan Building"

I put together this building before starting on the viaduct, so I'm just getting back to sharing my experience with it now.  This building is a kit called "Stump Tower" from a small family-owned firm called Lunde Studios.  I call it "the Rhodan Building".  While I'd like to have more 'modern' looking skyscrapers, I think this is a pretty good building to help give my city an 'urban' feel.  And while it seems to be a very obviously American style mid-century high rise, I've seen similar buildings in places as unusual as Shanghai. And let's face it, there's just something nice and gothic about these old, concrete/masonry high-rises.

As this building is a cast resin kit, I had to spend a lot more time than usual in preparing the building...a lot of flashing must be removed before you can start to put it together.  However, once that was done, the building is cast in a great 'grey' color for this type of structure.   The thickness of the resin is such that no 'interior' painting was needed to ensure opacity from interior lighitng shining through (which is the standard with every other kit from all the normal structure manufacturers).

What this building will need, however, is a bit of weathering!  I applied a technique that I've been reading about in the Trix club magazine.  There's probably about a million ways to do this, and I won't pretend I have any great skill, but I did create a short little video to illustrate just how easy this project is.  The only ingredients you'll need are some lighter fluid (Zippo) and some oil paint (as in artist's oil paints).  

Assembly was super fast.  Cleaning the flashing took the longest amount of time, which made gluing all the window frames seem relatively fast by comparison!  Although I decided to keep the basic color that it was cast in, I did paint the window frames black.  Becasue I was going to add wiring and still needed to add the window 'glass' I started by doing two wall sections first....and allowing them to adhere at a solid 90 degree angle, and basically left it open like this to the very end.

Speaking of windows, before assembly I randomly masked out areas of where the windows will be on the clear plastic sheets provided for 'glass'.  I then sprayed the clear, plastic sheets with black spray paint.   I then created 'drapery' on my computer (which anyone can do, its just boxes the relative size of the window frames and filled with different color lines and patterns), printed 'the drapes' out with my color inkjet printer, and then glued to the back side of the blacked out windows to create a 'drape' look (after removing the masking tape of course).  This allows me to add lighting to the upper stories of this building, but also have some diversity with some windows showing some transparency through the 'drapes' and others being completly blacked out.  The below photo shows a couple of sections ready for the 'drapes' to be applied to the 'open' spaces.  In the background is the sheet of paper with my drapes!

Once I had a couple of the walls together, its time for the electricians to take over.  For the signs over the ground floor stores (ultimately I decided on a "diner" and a "Games Workshop"), I drilled holes for the LEDs that will poke through and provide the lighting for the signage:

For all other lights - the ground floor details and the ambient lighting for the upper stories - I created an "LED Tree".  This was constructed with sintra (a stiff type of plastic material available at sign shops), and hot glued together.  I also made the 'LED tree' an extension of the ground floor details.  This was a new approach for me and I'll likely repeat it on all my large/tall structures. The photo below shows the LED tree with holes drilled, LED's inserted, and fastened to the sintra with a bit of hot glue.  Towards the bottom you can see that the base is also the area where the ground floor interior details will be as well.

Of course, the next stage is soldering all of the LEDs to the resistors and getting all the wiring in order.  This is an area where I think I get a little better with each building.  Looking back on some of my early LED soldering/wiring jobs, they are starting to look very rough!  I expect I will fully feel that way about this one in the future too!   After all the wiring is complete, the entire structure is assembled.

Below is a close up of the ground floor:

And a final shot showing that I think the ink-jet printer did a pretty fair job of simulating drapes!  There is a still yet-to-be determined SMD LED on the roof that I ultimately believe will light a billboard or something.  Better to wire it in now than wish I had done it when its all done!

As I said, a really easy kit to build once you've gotten past the initial 'flashing removal' phase.  And another nice, tall, semi-decrepit structure to fill in my 'city'!

As usual, I owe thanks to the "LED center" resistor calculator for helping me come up with the right resistors for this project!