Preparing Model Train Layout Kits for Assembly

One of the things you wanna do before you get any glue out, before you get any paint out is just open up the box, open up the bag, whatever your kit comes in, and just inspect all the parts. You wanna make sure that you've got all the parts there, familiarize yourself with what each of them is, and be sure to read the manufacturer's instructions. Read those instructions as if you were building the kit right now. Make sure you understand what it is they're talking about when they say glue this part to that part because what you don't wanna do is misunderstand or misread the instructions when you're actually building the building and wind up by gluing something together or painting something and having it being a mistake. That's one of the things you wanna do right away before you start building. Another of the things that you wanna do before you start building is wash all of the plastic parts. The reason that you wanna do that is because a lot of times, manufacturers have certain oils in the manufacturing process that will kind of stay with the plastic. What you wanna do is get those oils off of there because our model paints won't stick to those oils very well. So just fill up the sink with a little bit of warm water. Don't make it too hot. You don't wanna warp any of the plastic. Put some dish washing detergent in there. Let the parts soak for a little bit. If you wanna use a little toothbrush just to clean 'em off a little bit, that's even better. And then make sure they're nice and dry before you start building the building and that way, all the oils will come off. If your kit comes on sprues and those are those long, thin pieces of plastic that you don't actually use in the building that are used to mold the actual pieces, if your building comes of sprues, what you'll wanna do is cut the pieces off the sprues. To do that, you'll use something called sprue cutters, sprue nippers. They come in kind of two varieties. One of them looks kind of like a pair of scissors or a pair of pliers. They've got a very flat back on them so that you can put them right up against the part that you're gonna be cutting off the sprue, and nipping that off right almost flush with the wall, itself. The other kind of sprue nippers look sort of like fingernail clippers. They've got a nice, sharp edge on them, a nice flat surface on them, and they work exactly the same way as the other ones where you can cut that, or nip that sprue very, very close to the wall. But you'll wanna also make sure you have an emery board or a file, or some fine, you don't want it to be too coarse, you want a fine file that you can then sand off those little sprue nubs with to make sure that none of those show on your final building. You don't have to go too crazy with that. You don't wanna destroy any of the walls, but you do wanna get those little nubs out. Now, design preservation models kits also have one other thing that you'll need to do. Because of the way the manufacturer actually molds the walls, the bottoms of all the walls have a slight angle to them. They're not 90 degrees to the wall. They have a little slight angle to them and that, just to be able to pop them out of the molds. So what you're gonna wanna do with DPM models is sand that bottom surface flat. The easiest way to do that is just to get a piece of sandpaper and a nice, flat surface and rub the bottoms of those, of all of your walls up against that. And that will make sure that they sit nice and flat when you are, when you finally have the building. Now, a couple of considerations to take into account before you actually start building the building. One of them is painting. You're undoubtedly gonna want to paint a plastic model and you wanna do that for two reasons. Number one, and probably the most important one is plastics has a certain sheen to it, a certain shine to it that looks unnatural. It doesn't look like real bricks. It doesn't look like real wood if you're building a wood building. So by painting it with a nice, flat model color, you're going to give that building side a nice, flat texture to it and it'll look much more realistic than just, in this case, a beige piece of plastic on there. Secondly, you'll probably wanna paint your model just to make it look not like everybody else's model. A lot of modelers will buy the same kits, put them on their model railroad, and it's kinda nice if you've painted yours a different color. Now manufacturers will mold the walls and various parts in the colors that they think would look good, so you'd have a red wall and a black roof. But if you change the color by painting that red wall maybe a beige or maybe a rust color, or a brick-red color, you can have the same structure that other modelers have on their layout except yours will look much different. So that's something to consider. Now, secondly, if you're building a brick structure you have to decide early on whether you want to have mortar lines show on your model. And mortar lines, of course, are the lines between the bricks. There's a couple of schools of thought on that. Some modelers will say well, you're looking at your model from far enough away that if it was a real building, you wouldn't see those mortar lines, anyway. There's another school of thought that says that's true, the mortar lines may be a little bit out of scale, but they add a certain level of detail, a certain level of, if you will, eye candy to buildings and make them look that much more detailed. In a little bit, we'll be talking about three different techniques to have mortar lines on a brick, a plastic brick building. I'm gonna show you techniques for those. But one of the things you're gonna wanna do, again, is paint it first. And I mention this because one of the mortar techniques involves painting the walls right away the color of the mortar. Now, painting walls, if you've got an airbrush, please use it. Airbrushes lay down a great, thin coat of paint. They don't obscure any of the details if you take your time when you're painting with an airbrush. And make sure the paint doesn't sag. And we'll be talking about painting in just a second. Airbrushes will give your model a great finish. If you don't have an airbrush, you can always pick one up. They're relatively inexpensive. They're not cheap. You don't wanna get a cheap airbrush because that is just not going to do you a good service in your modeling. But if you do buy an airbrush, this is a tool that you'll be using for the rest of your model railroading career. It's something that is a kind of a nice tool to have, and again, it will pay for itself time and time, and time again, as you build models of freight cars, as you build structures, and as you weather track, it has all sorts of uses. You can get a single-action airbrush relatively inexpensively. They sell cans of propellant that you can buy that will spray the paint out of your airbrush if you can't afford a compressor. But by all means, try to use an airbrush when you're doing your structures. If you have to paint it and you don't have an airbrush, paint it by brush, try to avoid using what's called rattle-can paint. These are inexpensive paints that you can buy at hardware stores or big box type stores that you can buy for a dollar or two a can. The problem with those paints is the pigment in them is very, very thick and they tend to obscure some of the details on your models, especially those small, little details that you want to really have show. So if you have a choice, use an airbrush. If you don't have an airbrush, brush-paint it. And if you can't brush-paint it for some reason, then resort to using the rattle-can paints. But let's talk a bit about airbrushing techniques and do a little bit of a momentary bypass here from building our structure and talk about painting.