To continue my Chicago peninsula, I needed to build Andrews Manufacturing, named after my nephew. It's built from the LifeLike Mt. Vernon Manufacturing kit. On Art Curren's plan, his building was more like a square attached to the side of the longer rectangle, but I've deviated from his plan on the end of the layout, so I built mine as a long rectangle because it fit better.
The Mt. Vernon kits assemble as a bunch of self-contained rectangles. You can then stack these boxes either on top of each other or side by side in any configuration you want. Just remember to put in the window glass before you start gluing on the upper stories.
Here's Andrews Mfg. already under construction. Make sure you count out how many pieces you have of each section and make a mock up before you start, otherwise you may run short of the pieces you need. Pay particular attention to things like freight doors or office doors which can only go on the first floor (unless you want to make some sort of walkway or elevated loading area that would use an overhead crane of some sort).
The tolerances on this kit are not good. You can see big gaps between a couple of sections, and those are fitted perfectly together. I had to make some judicious use of downspouts to hide these fissures. You will also find that some pieces fit into the grooves of the bases a little better than others for some reason. You just have to play around and swap sections to get everything to work right.
Here's the completed -- or so I thought -- piece. Then I realized there was no door to the place. You could deliver freight, but you couldn't get in or out of the building. Oops.
Luckily, I had enough to build another section that included a man door. It also added a little more interest to the building. Don't forget to put the glass int he skylights before you glue on the roofs.
The biggest challenge was what to do with the awful freight doors that come with it. I opted to use my Dremel with a sanding wheel on it and sanded the doors off as best I could, as well as the "shipping and receiving" sign that is next to EVERY door. I used some leftover DPM doors and glued them directly to the wall. That was followed by some heavy weathering and some signage.
Here are the DPM doors painted and in place.
Now we get some signage. It's printed from the computer then glued to styrene and then glued to the building and weathered. I also added some numbers next to the door using Woodland Scenics dry rubs. Note the downspouts to hide the cracks...
A view from the office end that will face the end of the peninsula. I painted the roofs with black tempera paint to take the shine off of the black plastic. The weathering is also black tempera paint that was slopped on, then mostly wiped off with a damp paper towel.
The backside. This is one of three buildings near the end of the peninsula that stay the same on both sides -- there's too much open space around them to try to make them into something else and it would look silly. The other buildings can't be viewed from both sides at once, so it works for them, but not for this one. Andrews sits off on its own.
The other non-office end...
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