Hornby renovated

After a few finishing touched - large doors and painting the drainpipes - the Hornby building is fully renovated.

Despite it's lowly origins as a 50p buy from a second hand stall, I'm quite pleased with the results. Some early (1980s - early!) plastic kits are pretty good and repay careful building.

In fact, I'd say there is an awful lot of the Hornby accessories range from this era that are unjustifiably ignored by modellers. They are kicking around eBay and second hand stalls - grab them before people realise what they are missing out on!

You might notice that the building is empty. Well, that's part of the tribute to Margate works, which is also empty now Hornby have moved out...

Making signs

Now we live in the future, certain things have become a lot easier. One of these is producing bespoke signage. Given a computer and printer, anyone can rattle off signs that would have required the efforts of a skilled man with a brush years ago.

So it is in miniature. Running off replacement signs for the Hornby building to replace the ones pulled off the kit when I was stripping paint was the matter of a few minutes work with a desktop publishing package (Serif PagePlus 7). The Hornby logo is lifted from their website and despite being web quality, is more than good enough for this purpose. I like to run off lots of different sizes as despite measuring, it's nice to have options to see what looks right on the model.

The only problem was that the signs came out brown instead of red when printed on the photo quality paper. Telling the printer to clean it's heads solved this.

The final job is to cut them out, run a suitably coloured pen around the white edges and glue in place with UHU.

Windows

While stripping down the building, I tried to remove the plastic windows carefully, decided they were too well stuck in place and just bust them out with a poking finger.

Replacements were cut from 1mm thick plastic sheet. I tried to mark the bars by scribing them and filling the lines with white ink. This didn't work as the ink pulled out of the scratch as soon as I rubbed the excess away.

The second attempt was made with enamel (Humbrol 147) put on with a bow pen. Although I'm showing the best window, the others are OK, at least for this project. To be honest, I wish I'd gone for the bow pen straight away - a lesson to be learnt for next time. It's certainly the best way to represent steel industrial window frames.

Stripping paint

Back at the 50p Hornby building, I've spent half an hour at the sink with some Precision Paints Superstrip in an effort to remove the old paint. As you can see, I had reasonable success with the red brickwork but made no impression on the yellow stuff in the top panels.

Even getting this far took longer than expected. I worked the stripper in to the bricks with an old paintbrush and for about 15 minutes, only the faces cleaned up. Suddenly the chemicals got into the mortar and another quarter of an hour saw most of these cleared. Finally, I picked out the remaining paint with a sharp knife - it was loose but not ready to fall out.

After this, all the corners were re-glued and I filled in the worst of the gaps with Deluxe Materials plastic filler.

All this effort - I wish I'd just bought an unbuilt kit, but then I suppose that wouldn't have been so much fun!

Hornby factory

I've become a little obsessed with the Hornby "Town and Country" range of plastic kit buildings. There are several in my collection and I wouldn't mind picking up the rest. While they were badged Hornby, as Simon Kohler reveals in his blog, manufacture was by the European firm, Pola.
 

A little digging on the web finds that my 50 pence building is from their R281 Industrial Buildings kit. In the box you'd find the "Hornby" building and a modern northlight style structure. While long out of production, unused kits can still be found 2nd hand.

It's an odd beast really. Too small at 21cm by 9cm for an actual building but ideal for many model railways. Possibly the best bet would be to use it as the posh entrance to a much larger warehouse building. Basically, stick it on the front of one of the great big tin sheds that populate the out-of-town industrial parks of the nation.

My model is going to be a tribute to the real Hornby factory in Margate, which they moved out of earlier this year. OK, so the plastic version looks nothing like the real thing, I still think it can be made into a presentable model with some properly applied paint and perhaps better windows. It's better than being thrown away anyway, the normal fate of a model building if no-one will pay 50p for it.

I bought Hornby - for 50p

An irresistible bargain from the weekend - Hornby for 50p!

An ideal blog project I'm thinking. What am I planning? You'll have to watch this space...