Hilton (Heljan) Grand Hotel Mostly Complete

With some minor detailing and touch-ups, I was able to finish my Heljan Grand Hotel kit(s).   I was fortunate to get one, but a trade with a friend scored me a second one allowing me to double it up to get some more 'city height'!  And its quite tall!  My tallest building yet! Yikes! When will it stop!

I didn't make any major changes to the kit, but a lot of smaller things were done to it, or added to it.

As is always a good idea, even if you like the color it comes in, I repainted the entire building.  This includes a coat of black paint on the interior walls to impede translucency, and a light grey-ish color for the building exterior work (Model Masters Camouflage Grey), and a buff tan and metallic bronze for the windows and window frames (both of the later from conventional hardware store spray paints).

I liked the kit's exterior elevator with the glass walls detail, but felt like a second elevator was necessary (and yet, on my 20 story Aoshima apartment building, its all stairs! Go figure!), so I created my own 'glass' elevator shaft by painting the back wall for the shaft a dark grey (with some wires and other random strips of material to simulate the inner workings of an elevator) and using the metallic bronze paint on a strip of clear acrylic for the window trim on the glass face.

I also added an elevator, with an SMD LED in the elevator roof, to the left-hand elevator 'shaft'.  I think this is my favorite feature.

At the top of this new elevator shaft is a backlit "Hilton" logo.  This was fairly simple; used my ink jet printer on some decent paper (e.g. somewhat thin paper for photo printing), sandwiched between the same logo printed on my ink jet on transparency sheets to create the sign, and then backlit with three LED's.

On the rooftop, 3 Miniatronics flashing red LED's were added, with the center one sitting on a Plastruct girder-created 'antenna' tower.

On the ground floor, I wanted to do something to make the entrance less tall (and loose as much of the remaining legacy of HO this kit may have) so I added a backlit sign for the "Hilton Grand Hotel" using the same method as described above.

The windows received three different treatments: Thin black styrene sheets; masking tape, or packaging tape.  Each in turn gives the effects of dark, occupied and shades drawn.

Lighting the interior was the easiest part.  I used a flexible strip of 30 SMD LED's from trainaidsa called the FX 12 Volt Flexible Lighitng strip.

This was simply wrapped around a piece of styrene (actually, sintra) that goes up the interior of the building and was soldered to the leads for the other LED arrays in the building.  Wallah! The lights are on, but still nobodies home!

I was too impatient to set up the tripod for some 'night photography' but of the dozen or so I hastily shot, the below shows how it looks at night with some of the other structures:

As I mentioned at the top, still need to attach a few more details (e.g. the ground floor is empty and needs some detail, some sanding and touch up is also required of paint that got damaged, etc...).