A year ago, I started a model railroad kit – not a railroad car, but a building. The photo on the kit box suggests it should look like this:
Your typical old-fashioned corner drugstore.
The walls are beautiful flat plaster castings, molded from hand-carved masters, that you have to sand and fit at the corners. But I screwed up the corners; they didn’t come together as nicely as shown in the picture. Then I managed to poke a finger through the delicate entrance section.
Phooey.
After some thought, I decided to see if I could replace the plaster walls with 3D printed ones. I used a free program (for making cameos from a photo) to convert an image of a brick wall to a 3D file, and used that as a starting point. Here’s the building in the CAD program (minus some trim and the doors and windows):
One thing I like is the brick pattern is less regular than the kit’s.
I used the kit’s molded plastic windows and doors, and the triangle roof trim, but other than that, mostly just the design.
And here is the final building (I didn’t take any pictures during construction):
The sign is also 3D printed. The building didn’t fit the kit’s foundation, so I carved my own from plaster, then carved the surrounding “ground” out of foam. The sidewalk is made of squares cut from plastic sheet. The signs are from images from Google, which I cleaned up (and modified in some cases). I painted the building, and weathered everything. I made interiors (with lighting) to give it life. The effect of light and shadow on the sidewalk was a nice surprise!
A lot of work but fun to figure out how to do things.
The pharmacist isn’t very busy at the moment.
