A Faller-inspired Kit-bash (Part 1)

One of my favorite buildings from the 'early days' of the N Gauge hobby was the Faller 2293 office building.  An explicitely modern building, its funky blue and creme colored structure with white window frames always brings a smile to my face when I see it in photos and on others layouts.  It also comes with a sheet of paper containing some really classic, 1970's style logos of various German/European brands.

2011:
Several years ago I collected 3 unbuilt kits and 3 built versions of this building and attempted to build an 'homage' of sorts to this structure by building a new building using just the white windows from the 2293 kits and deconstructed built versions.
 
I originally had intended to use the blue pieces as well, but I've found that the actual floor height of this buildings is fairly short for today's N Gauge standards (I think this is closer to Z guage than N) so in my first kit bash I created my own structure to give the building the right floor height (or at least a bit better than the original).


The ulimate result  of this '2293' homage project turned out okay...the big challenge was that the white window frames (especially on the older, built buildings that I diss-assembled) were extremely brittle and were difficult to get to look right.

While the ultimate result was somewhat satisfactory, it definitely was not really an homage to my favorite structure the way I originally intended.   It still sits prominently on the layout however.



2013:
I've been going through a lot of old boxes attempting to organize/clean the train room and I came across the original 'blue' wall pieces from the 3 unbuilt Faller 2293 kits.  It seems wrong to throw them in the trash, yet I am quickly getting overrun with all sorts of miscellany of parts and really didn't want to keep them in this start much longer.

So I decided its time to do another attempt at an homage to this building, but this time I'll be using the 'blue' facade pieces rather than the windows as the basis for this homage!

Also, its been a while since I've scratch built/kit-bashed or otherwise built a large building, and I've been wanting a new project like this for a while!

To start, I decided this building would only be facing toward the street - so essentially the backs and sides will be 'blank walls (no windows).    I determined that I had 18 (6 from 3x kits) different pieces of the blue plastic facade sections to work with, and the two longer sections could be used to make the building a nice wide version.

Using 1/8" thick clear acrylic sheet as my base, I scored floors using the basic height of two lego pieces (its just around 20mm or so, which I think is still on the short side if you were going to be prototypical, but more than generous when compared to most models!). 

I've then spent several long, tedious hours on the laborious process of cutting all of these pieces off their sprues, sanding, cleaning...

...slicing the little 'nubs' off the backs so they can lay flat!

And finally, laying them out on a sheet of cardboard for priming and painting.  As a matter of practice, I always paint my plastic kits to remove that plastic 'sheen', give a more custom look, and helps to add some opacity for the interior lighting that will be added later.

On the acryrilic sheet itself, I'm masking out the sheet against the earlier floor scorings to create the 'window frames' over which the plastic facade pieces will be added.

Spray-painting onto acrylic with masking tape is always a hit or miss exercise....bleed through is usually really difficult to control and once it starts there's little you can do to salvage the project!  My approach is to ensure that the Tamiya masking tape is well secured to the acrylic, and then apply several very light 'dustings' of paint to prevent any chance of bleed-through.  We'll see how well that turns out in my next post on this topic!