Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers - N Scale

[Academy Staff]

Thanks everyone. It's a fun project to work on, and as always, it's a learning experience and an experiment at the same time.

Originally Posted by dash10
How did you do the curved roof valences Alex? They look so nice and uniform. Fred

The "swoopy" bits (thanks to Shaywen for that term!) are made out of poster board. Basically, a thick strip (the red one in the picture of the backlit sign) is glued to the building - it protrudes about 1/16". Then, the poster board is cut and is curved to fit against the building at the top and across the red strip at the bottom. If you keep a constant radius on the curvature, then you are assured uniformity. The vertical stripes are simply made from thinly sliced paper and are spaced out at 1/8".

One trick I do to keep things neat is I paint things before I assemble them. In the case of the strips, I cut them from paper or poster board and paint them. Then I cut as long a piece as needed and glue. It's a lot easier to touch up some paint than to paint the entire piece once it's glued in place. Sometimes it adds an extra degree of difficulty, as you have to really plan all the colors and stuff ahead, but I think that the challenge is part of the joy of scratch-building!

The building's made of illustration board - it's a kind of card stock you can get at Office Depot. The bricks is just a graphic that I printed out on paper and using spray adhesive, attached it to the walls. I took a picture of the wall and straightened it out in Photoshop. Then I repeated it over and over and printed out a sizable sheet of it.

Originally Posted by meander
very smart on the bricks thing. ill try it. and ill have to get some of that board. do they have it at staples?

They might. Look where they have poster board and art supplies. It's a thick card stock about 1/16" thick or so. You can get 3 big sheets for about 10 bucks. I havent even gone through one yet.