Custom Model Railroads – N Scale St. Paul Building: Part 1

I’ve been jumping around quite a bit from project to project.  Mostly because I’ve been extremely busy and I find myself doing the “easy” parts of a model build and once I hit the parts that will take me more time, I just to the next project. As I’ve always said, I will absolutely complete every project I start here, so if you’ve been following along with anything — don’t worry — at some point it will be back.

For my latest jump in projects, I’ve switched gears to the St. Paul Building by Custom Model Railroads.  I’ve been waiting to do one of the CMR kits for some time, and as soon as the kit came in the mail, I just had to get started with it.  This is one of the kits I posted an announcement about when I heard they were going to be produced.

The CMR kits are laser cut acrylic.  For me, this is my first time working with a laser cut kit and certainly my first time working with acrylic (Plexiglas).  Unlike styrene, acrylic needs to be “welded” by a solvent.  CMR recommends “Tenax 7R Space Age Plastic Welder”, which I easily found at my hobby store.

I have not used Tenax before and it took me some time to get used to working with it.  Tenax is VERY thin with less surface tension than water and I found it pretty difficult to control.  To say that it works by capillary action is an understatement.  I’m convinced that this stuff can split an atom.

The Tenax technically melts two pieces of plastic together, but unlike standard modeling cement that does the same thing, it does not act like a glue or become sticky.  You have to have the pieces you’re trying to weld positioned in place before applying the Tenax.  It works into the seams and evaportates in seconds. Actually faster than I could describe.  Once evaportated, the two pieces are one solid mass — again without any actual glueing.

I read that many people use a paint brush to apply the Tenax, but I really don’t know how that’s possilbe.  The stuff literally evaporates off the brush before you can really use it of of a brush.  But CMR sells a bottle to use with the Tenax and although even that was tricky, once I got the hang of it, it worked well.

For this project, I started with the CMR N Scale St. Paul Building kit (8 stories) and one add-on kit (4 stories). For those of you not familiar with this type of kit, it is laser cut from thin, 2D acrylic and designed so that the acrylic pieces are layered to create a 3D structure.  The photo below shows some of the acrylic pieces.

The kit is designed as “units”.  On the final structure, there are several ledges that run around the perimeter of the building at different heights.  Each unit is a section of the structure between ledges. In this case, the main kit is made up of 4 units.  Because the construction of each unit works the same way, I am only showing the work for one unit — the unit I’m showing is actually the four story add-on kit which is identical to one of the units in the main kit.

Each unit it first built as a box — four sides with a top and bottom ledge.

While the photo above shows this unit with only two sides standing, I found it much easy to dry-fit the entire unit with all four sides standing and then apply the Tenax.  This allowed the walls and top pieces to be properly aligned without trying to individually square the walls.

Once the basic walls are constructed for a unit, additional pieces are added to give the structure dimension.  Most layers, including the main walls easily fit into slots cut into the ledge.

The main walls that make the basic unit’s “box” are plain acrylic, but each layer you add becomes more and more detailed with etched laser lines — to form brick patterns for example.  I’m hoping that the etched detail will stand out once the building is painted and weathered.  But I must admit that the etching detail seems relatively light and faint right now.

Once all of the units are assembled, they simply stack on top of each other.  Here they’re simply placed on top of each other, so the units are not actually aligned.  I won’t attach them together until after the parts are painted and window frames (separate pieces) are painted and installed.

One thing that I was a little disappointed by was the two back sides of the structure have no brick detail.  Those walls are simply plain acrylic.  I’m assuming that etching this much brick pattern would significantly add to the cost of the kit, but I’m going to need to find some way to make that look better.  On the plus side, there’s plenty of wall space on this side of the building for a large billboard.

Overall, I really like this kit. Besides the learning curve with the Tenax, the CMR kit itself went together extremely well and suprisingly fast.  I will definately be getting future kits from Custom Model Railroads.

To give you an idea of what this looks like, here is the St. Paul Building standing with other common structures.  Again, remember — the pieces are simply stacked and not well aligned at this point.

And finally, for those of you that might be interested in this kit, but wouldn’t want to use the add-on to increase the structure height, here it is as just the main kit (sorry it’s cut off a bit).

Until next time!

Filed under: Products, Structures , CMR, Custom Model Railroads, model, model kit, model railroad, model railroading, N Scale, scale model, scale modeling, structure