Hi Shop Dwellers, it's 47*F with a light SE wind and a few clouds over my property; gonna be raining starting at 1:00am and lasting all throughout Monday.
Thank you everybody for the "likes" and comments on my Black Friday post:
Chad, Karl, Joe, Rick, Tom, Jerry, Willie, James, Phil, Garry, Sherrell, Guy, Curt.
In between chores on Saturday, I was able to finish assembling the Dairy Queen. Thought it would be a simple task, but when it was time to join the front corners, this nominal 15-minute job wound up taking me two hours. The design of the kit, where the window panes are beveled to butt against each other, makes it very difficult to apply glue without having it get sucked-under the "glass" by capillary action.
First I applied a thin strip of the Testors glue along one side of the right front corner, and that seemed to work...
for a while. The trouble started when I noticed the I couldn't get a "flush" joint between the two sides of the left front corner. Apparently when I glued the front-facing window pane in [with water-based WS Tak-E-Glue], I didn't get it in
perfectly centered - it was an extra ~0.001" toward the left, and that was what was preventing the left side exterior wall corners from butting up clean against each other. That dried Tak-e-Glue wasn't going to release the misaligned glass without a fight, so I tried to simply shave off some of the excess window pane material with an Exacto blade.
Applying force to do the cutting caused the already-cemented right front corner to come apart - requiring me to apply still
more Testors glue to that side. Soon, on
both corners, the dark gray primer paint I had sprayed on the interior walls started dissolving in the Testors glue and seeping thru the cracks; not too bad on the right side, but the left corner looked
horrible! I tried hiding that defect with Tamiya white paint, but it was the wrong shade and didn't match the unpainted white styrene. I would have to paint over all of the exterior white surfaces if I want to go that route, but I've already spent way too much time on this project so forget that idea!
Luckily the left front corner will be facing the backdrop so visitors won't see it. But I'm still pist at having it look so shabby after all the time I spent on this thing. If I ever decide to relocate the DQ to a spot where the left side has to face outward, I will first have to spend significant time repairing the left front corner.
So...FWIW, here are some photos of each of the four sides of the finished structure, starting from the right and going counterclockwise:
This last photo shows the DQ positioned in its [unfinished] intended location. I originally had an old LifeLike Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in that spot, but it was not only
cliche' but an eyesore as well; it also obscured the view of trains at the crossing. The much-smaller DQ structure opens up the space considerably:
Unfortunately,
this angle is what 90% of layout visitors are going to see - they will have to step rightward into a tight corner in order to see the detailed front.
...and with that, it's time for me to sign off.