Scratch-built card and styrene structures (based on real buildings around London Bridge)

[DGO]

12 hours ago, Siberian Snooper said:

I keep having to remind myself that this is in 2mm.

 

Agree completely, I suspect most people would be very happy to get that level of detail at 4mm let alone 2mm 

[grahame]

While clearing up the dining room table for the weekend I took a quick snap of the tools and materials that I mostly use for making buildings and structures that might be of interest:

 

 

Materials

1 - card

2 - scene-setters glazing bar grids for windows

3 - Redutex flexible self adhesive roofing with relief

4 - Evergreen styrene strip

5 - mountboard

6 -  brick embossed plastic sheet

Tools

7 - steel scale rule

8 - sanding sticks

9 - paintbrushes

10 - knife - no3 handle with 10A blade

11 - 6b pencil for weathering/dirtying down

12 - tweezers

13 - smooth jawed pliers

14 - engineers square

16 - pencil for marking out 

Glues

18 - superglue

19 - liquid solvent for plastic

Paint/finishing

17 - posca paint pens

20 - acrylic brushing paint

21 - acrylic spray paint

22 - Halfords car colour spray paint

23 - Halfords spray primer

24 - Spray matt varnish

 

And for no.15, which is probably the most important, is the green self-healing cutting mat beneath everything. It's not an exhaustive list but it covers the majority of requirements and are the things I mostly use.

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2020 by grahame

[acg5324]

Wish my cutting mat was that tidy........mine pretty well duplicates yours but I don’t use superglue for much and I use a very old Stanley snap blade craft knife that dates from the mid 80s.

[grahame]

On 05/12/2020 at 19:16, acg5324 said:

Wish my cutting mat was that tidy.......

 

Ha ha. It wasn't that tidy to start with as I quickly rearranged the items for the photo. And that cutting mat is my relatively clean one that I often use to photo models on. The other one I use is much more battered, distressed and stained with paint and glue and things. 

 

 

[Douglas G]

I always find your posting very interesting and informative, Grahame!

[grahame]

This week has seen very little modelling but there's a customer in the showroom (a lady in a yellow dress), there's some fencing erected down the side from the showroom and light globes are now on the gate posts. They're map pin heads - a little large but will suffice - and, of course, they don't actually light up. Not only do I not recall seeing the real ones alight, the thought of installing working lighting in all the buildings I've made is an effort beyond me.

 

[millerhillboy]

Superb. Nothing else to say.

[grahame]

I've been doing a little research on the petrol station that was next to and a little in front of the gas holder station. I say 'was' as it became a van hire centre, then a Hertz car rental and now appears to be an empty and fenced compound with the buildings boarded up. Prior to the petrol station it was a pub called the Turks Head but that was a long time before my modelling period and when the entrance to the gas works was in a different position:

 

 

Getting info and pics of it when it was a petrol station has been very difficult and all I've come across is this pic which is of a bus with the petrol station behind and left. The bus stop was originally a little further up the road in front of some terraced shops and now appears further back in front of the compound as in the current streetview screengrab above.

 

 

With the space for the petrol station very much compressed and rather misshapen I'm going to need to effectively design and make the entire petrol station from scratch. Does anyone recognise the petrol company blue and yellow livery (chevron?) so I can at least get that right? Anyway, firstly I've cut the footprint area from mountboard card and will use that as a base:

 

 

 

 

 

[grahame]

And a quick snap of how it fits with the gas holder station:

 

[grahame]

44 minutes ago, grahame said:

Does anyone recognise the petrol company blue and yellow livery (chevron?) so I can at least get that right?

 

Jet perhaps?

 

 

[Bilbo]

I would have said "Gulf" from the colour.

[ChrisH-UK]

I agree on Jet at the time of that photo, but that's what, 20 years later than your chosen timeframe?

[Mulgabill]

1 hour ago, grahame said:

I've been doing a little research on the petrol station that was next to and a little in front of the gas holder station. I say 'was' as it became a van hire centre, then a Hertz car rental and now appears to be an empty and fenced compound with the buildings boarded up. Prior to the petrol station it was a pub called the Turks Head but that was a long time before my modelling period and when the entrance to the gas works was in a different position:

 

 

Getting info and pics of it when it was a petrol station has been very difficult and all I've come across is this pic which is of a bus with the petrol station behind and left. The bus stop was originally a little further up the road in front of some terraced shops and now appears further back in front of the compound as in the current streetview screengrab above.

 

 

With the space for the petrol station very much compressed and rather misshapen I'm going to need to effectively design and make the entire petrol station from scratch. Does anyone recognise the petrol company blue and yellow livery (chevron?) so I can at least get that right? Anyway, firstly I've cut the footprint area from mountboard card and will use that as a base:

 

 

 

 

 

1st reaction is Jet or Conoco, although 2nd thought is that Jet became Conoco.

 

Should be more definate given that Conoco Phillips pays my pension, but I was

on the Phillips side before their merger.

 

Keep up the good work

 

TONY

[acg5324]

I’d have said Jet too.

[grahame]

37 minutes ago, ChrisH-UK said:

I agree on Jet at the time of that photo, but that's what, 20 years later than your chosen timeframe?

 

Yep. That pic was taken in 2005 (15 years ago) and the petrol station livery seems to comply with Jet style and colours for the 1990s. According to this website (below) the Jet petrol brand was established in the 1950s. In the 1960s the logo was black lettering on yellow. In the 1970s a fawn/brown band was added below the yellow band. In the 1980s the lettering switched to blue and the fawn/brown disappeared. In the 1990s a thin red stripe between the yellow and blue bands was added as in the photo. That appears to have gone for the 2000s: 

 

https://www.phillips66.co.uk/EN/newscentre/photo_library/pages/historical.aspx

 

So looks like I have suitable info for whatever period I fancy making it.

 

 

[ChrisH-UK]

 

1 minute ago, grahame said:

 

So looks like I have suitable info for whatever period I fancy making it.

 

Yep, you have something you can make a fair assumption with due to a lack of any other evidence. My concern was in my local area Bucks/Herts/Gt London, I can't think of any petrol station that hasn't changed companies in 30 years (other than the ones that went out of business). But really it comes down to the facts that you can only base what you do on what you can find, most people aren't going to know any more that what you've found, and if they do and it really bothers you it's just a totem, canopy edging and the branding above the shop.

 

[grahame]

The Jet garage near here has been Jet for 25 years so perhaps they tend to stick a bit more than normal. The petrol station in the village closed many years ago and is now a block of flats. I can't remember what the company was. The other garage in the village stopped selling petrol and had the pumps removed probably when the local race track at Brooklands stopped holding race meetings, but does undertake repairs, services and MOTs. I have my car serviced there as it's a short walk away and it would have made a far nicer model garage being a rather attractive art deco building:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 17, 2020 by grahame

[K14]

The Jet station is now a BP & it's further down the OKR, opposite what was Toys 'R' Us and Asylum Road.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4806502,-0.0595177,3a,75y,87.1h,80.59t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sW61iYWyljEAb5hk3EiFn0w!2e0!5s20080701T000000!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en-US

 

Managed to snaffle this frame from some 70s footage on YouTube:

 

 

There's a blurry sign just to the left of the tree... Texaco?

 

Edited December 18, 2020 by K14
Added image

[Mulgabill]

7 hours ago, K14 said:

The Jet station is now a BP & it's further down the OKR, opposite what was Toys 'R' Us and Asylum Road.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4806502,-0.0595177,3a,75y,87.1h,80.59t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sW61iYWyljEAb5hk3EiFn0w!2e0!5s20080701T000000!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en-US

 

Managed to snaffle this frame from some 70s footage on YouTube:

 

 

There's a blurry sign just to the left of the tree... Texaco?

 

Could be Regent

 

TONY

[grahame]

9 hours ago, K14 said:

The Jet station is now a BP & it's further down the OKR, opposite what was Toys 'R' Us and Asylum Road.

 

 

How things change. There never used to be a garage where that BP one is and a little further down the Rising Sun pub has gone and a food warehouse is now in its place. The ToysRus (now apparently a Lidl) was a secondhand lorry sales park and the restaurant opposite the works was the Kentish Drovers pub - a rough disco pub in those days. Even the nice little Fullers pub just down Commercial Way (opposite the works) is no longer a pub. I occasionally went there at lunchtimes before they opened a bar in the works over the canteen.

 

Thanks for the vid-grab (I did manage to get a version earlier in the thread). It's taken from the top deck of a bus and unfortunately jumps to a bomb/building site just as it's about to cover the garage area. I actually don't recall it being a petrol station - I certainly never filled up there.

[DGO]

9 hours ago, K14 said:

The Jet station is now a BP & it's further down the OKR, opposite what was Toys 'R' Us and Asylum Road.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4806502,-0.0595177,3a,75y,87.1h,80.59t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sW61iYWyljEAb5hk3EiFn0w!2e0!5s20080701T000000!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en-US

 

Managed to snaffle this frame from some 70s footage on YouTube:

 

 

There's a blurry sign just to the left of the tree... Texaco?

 

Think I agree with Texaco, here's another petrol station from the late 70's with a very similar sign, the ring around should I think be red, but old pics and distance can desaturate the colours

 

 

The only Alternative I can think of would be Mobil, who had a similar squashed hexagonal sign in the mid 50's 

 

But that logo changed by the 60's and so probably would not have been there after 1970

[grahame]

Things have changed so frequently down the OKR that I'm in bit of a quandary now as to what to model. Petrol station or not? And if petrol what brand? Even the BP station a little further down the OKR, that was once Jet but didn't even exist in the 70s/80s, was also a Texaco in the early 2000s:

 

 

 

Texaco above and BP below. And that blue self storage thing next door wasn't there back in the day:

 

 

I'm now contemplating the row of shops, that look quite interesting, as they were certainly there in the 1970s/80s, and reducing the garage/compound area to a simple van hire business (although that would mean the need for lots of vans - a tricky proposition in N/2mm). And the building doesn't appear to have changed much as in this 2020 aerial view - just the shops; I don't recall an afro-european hairdressers in the end one 40 years ago.

 

 

Edited December 18, 2020 by grahame

[Siberian Snooper]

The yards of most of the van hire companies in Plymouth are/were virtually empty, except on sundays.

 

 

[grahame]

Good point. Most vehicles of a hire company would be out hired during the week although I recall there was always some vehicles there, and certainly not just vans. If I make it as a simple open pound I can dress it with vehicles to represent most types of forecourt businesses, including an 'Rfer Daley dodgy car dealers lot.

 

[grahame]

I need to keep the compound area quite small to accommodate the shops building and the depth of the site is quite narrow due to the overall layout compression. Consequently it's a bit tight for vans but would probably suffice for a cars sales lot where vehicles tend to be crammed in. And I can probably jiggle things around a little to make it seem bigger: