I've expressed my enthusiasm for the old Arnold Universal Structure kits - which are increasingly hard to find - in the past. Last winter, a friend on one of the N Scale forums shared a tip about about a pretty rough-looking, completed version of one of these Arnold kits. Well, it was definitely in rough shape, but I won it for a some pretty small change so it could turn out to be a fairly interesting deconstruction project.
On that note....How do you take these old kits apart? Carefully, slowly, and with lots of luck! Mostly your hoping that the original builder used poor glue for plastic and didn't do a solid job of applying it. Even then, you still wind up with pieces that can't be saved and wind up in the trash.
After all the pieces are pried, scraped, or cut apart, its then down to
sanding and cleaning them up, and applying a new primer coat of paint.
Fortunately these leftover bits of the above structure are now finding a new life in a kit bash structure I've started work on. The concept here is that I need a really shallow backdrop building, that can also be used on a corner. The Arnold bits served as inspiration for a modern office building with some ground floor retail.
The upper stories will actually extend over the sidewalk / ground floor a bit as the most narrow Arnold sections I used for the 'skinny' side are still a bit too long for the rest of the backdrop, but I think it will turn out okay. If that last comment didn't make any sense, it should be clear on my next post on the rest of the backdrop buildings!
That's it for now...got quite a few layout things in the hopper (hey! Its Fall! That's modelling time again!) so I need to get back to work!
Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment