Parts
– Original, Custom, and ReclaimedParts
– Original, Custom, and Reclaimed
What you get most with Block City sets is, of course, the blocks. But there were other things too. This is a scan of a 1960's era instruction book page. What more is there to say? (You can tell these are old instructions! Advice to clean up a sliver of plastic with a pocketknife would never be given in these litigious days!)
Trouble is, after a while, you get old. You can make a case that you get more sophisticated, or you can make an equally strong case that your imagination has worn out, but after a while you may find that you need MORE STUFF.
I found that I needed more stuff when I started building scale models of the buildings inside a lunar dome in the science fiction stories I write. I needed sliding glass doors. Fancy entryways were a must as I was building blocks of flats, not single family homes. Storefront windows were good ideas too. So I wandered over to the local hobby shop, bought some styrene, and off I went. Here are some of the things I came up with.
Bricks came in white originally, and, later, in almond. With time and exposure to ultraviolet light, one usually finds that many of the white blocks have darkened over the years. Some of them have darkened only on the outside.
Doors, windows and copings were overwhelmingly red or green in the original sets (with white blocks), or blue (light or very pale) or brown in the later sets (almond blocks). However, clear to mustard-yellow accessories can be found on very rare occasions. Below is a photo of all the colors I have (my dark blue doors were already in a building and I couldn't get them out, so please see the window for color).
There are two types of windows that can be found; later sets had double-hung windows (as in the instruction sheet above) and earlier sets had mullioned windows.
Screen
doors, French doors and sliding glass doors didn't come with the
original sets, so I made my own.
The screen on the screen door was made by taking about ten X-Acto blades, setting them side by side and scratching the back of a sheet of clear styrene. This window has already seen a lot of use and is scratched (and, inevitably, coated in cat hair). A coat of clear Tamiya paint will take out most of the scratches.
Whenever I make plain windows, I bend the styrene a little so that it delaminates and makes a schiller or sheen in the "glass." It's easier to see that way and is a good visual shorthand for "there's glass here."
The French door was made with many pieces of styrene for the muttons and other woodwork, and one sheet of clear styrene for the glass. Since there was no real way to add a curtain to the door, I used Crystal Creations spray to create crystals on the back of the door to imitate curtains. The crystals are permanent once they're dry and stand up to a good deal of abuse.
By
the way, I always make my door five bricks tall, so that I don't need
the special caps for them. Can never find enough to cover all the
doors I tend to put in buildings anyway, and it saves using single
blocks which always create a weak spot.
Then I got it into my head that some crystal windows would be particularly cool and came up with these. The red styrene came from CD jewel cases. Some are standard sized windows, and the two large ones are meant as either ground-to-ceiling windows or interior walls. They look really remarkable with sunlight shining through them.
The crystal stuff comes in a spray bottle but it can also be painted onto specific parts of a window or door. It smells awful but is great fun. Best of all, while it looks delicate, it's actually quite permanent with normal handling (though it will wash off immediately if you get it wet).
Yeah,
windows look great. But I started staring at them a while back and
realized that something was missing... venetian blinds! When I was
growing up (or whatever I was doing) in the 1950s, venetian blinds
were sort of de rigeur. "Mini-blinds" with narrow
slats had not yet been invented. I used some very thin strips of
styrene to (very tediously) make the windows in the photo at left.
(By the way, the building doesn't bulge. That's just something my
camera does. Hey, it's a cheap camera, but it works.)
Later, when doing another building for a train set up, I found that the "clapboard" styrene sold for making the sides of HO scale buildings makes excellent, if somewhat less realistic venetian blinds. You can't change the angle (i.e., the blinds are always closed) and you can't see through the slats. You also can't make blinds where one side is pulled up more than the other, a common, homey touch.
The flashes of color on the window "glass"; come from the fact that the windows were made from CDROMs. CDROMs are cheap enough now that you can use them for purposes like this. How?
Write on it. Save anything to it, it doesn't matter. But I've found that the mylar on the back peels off much more easily if you write on the CD first.
CDROMs can be cut with a sturdy pair of scissors but I've found it's best to cut them, at least to initial size, with a paper cutter. As soon as you start to cut them, the mylar will start to peel off. Leave it on until the last possible moment! (Why? Because the microgrooves that cause the flashes of color are so fine that just a hard rub with your finger can erase them.) Once you've got them cut to size, well, they're just styrene, use them as you would any old styrene. I've made clear blocks from them.
I
originally started lighting bricks by drilling holes through clear or
frosted bricks I'd made, and sticking some little grain-of-wheat
holiday lights through them. This works great, as you can see in the
photo at right. The only problem with it is that even though these
lights are tiny, they produce a prodigious amount of heat. This turns
out to be sufficient to soften the styrene, especially the thin stuff
I was able to find to make the clear bricks (I wasn't going to
sacrifice any of the ones I had for this!).
The
answer was simple: white LEDs. They required a different set up (the
one in the photo below was built by my husband Bob). White LEDs are
expensive: the cheapest ones I found were about US$4.00 each, and
they require the use of some resistors wired on to them. But they can
be left on until the batteries run out, and give off a really lovely
light.
Now I've got an idea to make long blocks with ten or twelve keys on them, and use large LEDs in the center as ways to light up hallways and dark areas. A large LED on a two-key block will also light up a room very well.
When
you get sloppy with styrene welder, you can frost the clear styrene.
I quite like the effect; and I found you can actually enhance it by
painting the frosted areas with clear Tamiya
paints once they’ve dried.
(You can also use the clear, water-based paints meant for making
“suncatchers,” but you can’t mix the two types of paint.)
In the photo at right there is a main entry for a large commercial or institutional building, a door with frosted sidelights, a two-door large entry, and a glass window meant to imitate frost on a cold day. The result is pretty realistic, I think. I’ve tried the same thing with the Crystal Creations spray and that works too, but the crystals are on too large a scale to be realistic for this purpose.
I recently found out, quite by accident, that I can get much the same effect by spraying clear styrene with the sealing spray meant for metal leaf. Whatever the solvent is dissolves some of the styrene.
Of
course, once you’ve got clear paints, you get to doing stained
glass. Tamiya paints work for this but I’ve found that the
suncatcher paints work better, because they’re thicker and give a
brighter color. They can also be mixed and marbled.
The leading in the glass can be imitated by black lines from a permanent marker but those from a rapidograph, done in India Ink, are better yet.
The cat windows are part of a pair. The window on the far left has crystal spray. This will mix the paint, so don’t put it on the same side of the styrene as the pain unless you want lots of brown. If you put the spray on something with only one color, you’ll get colored crystals on a white ground. Now if only I could do that on my porcelains...
I've decided to give this it's own page, as I've come up with LOTS of ways to do this!
I
love apartment buildings. The best times of my life—apart from
those spent on the back of a Thoroughbred Hunter in Prospect
Park—were in 1850 52nd Street, No. 4B, Brooklyn 4, New
York. Alas, both of those times were a long, long time ago. But
anyway, as I said, I love apartment buildings. I build a lot of
apartment buildings. The trouble with apartment buildings is that
they’re typically multi-storey, and Block City, as it comes from
the tube, gives you no easy way to make floors. So I found some.
There are many uses for terminally broken blocks. I added styrene angle brackets to a few of them to hold up the floor. (Angle brackets are not necessary; a short length of strip styrene attached to the very bottom of a brick that still has a bottom will work just as well; I just happened to have angle bracket and no other use for it. One of the bracketed bricks is visible in the lower left corner of the photo.)
The floor is made of thick, clear lexan, because I can’t find thick, clear styrene and for this application, why bother looking. Using the crystal spray and the transparent paint I was talking about above, I made a freehand carpet design. I wanted something that I could see through and that also would let light in.
I made these carpets in all different sizes, from a full sheet of the lexan (you can get it at any hobby shop) to smaller sheets. As you can see, they don’t always fit the buildings you build but you can attach them to one another by using H-channel. Here’s a detail:
No gluing is required. Lexan and H-channel come in various sizes, and if you get the right sizes of each the lexan will fit snugly in the channel and come out again with just a little effort. Keep a bunch of strips of them, cut to various lengths, and you can carpet rooms large and small, hallways and whatever else you feel the need to carpet. I suppose you can make the kind of nice, flat ceilings and rooves that we used to sit on, on Friday nights in the summer, and watch the fireworks from Coney Island, and the Wonder Wheel and the Parachute Jump all lit up...
Now, strategically place your angle-bracket blocks in the walls, and your floor will be held up nicely. The crystals are pretty durable so long as you don’t get them wet; if you’re worried about them, just give them a light spray with Krylon Crystal Clear and they’ll be fine (though the crystals won’t be as visible).
Oooo! I just got an idea... hang a chandelier of LEDs from the center of a large “carpet” and you can light up the whole floor below!
You
know what’s the best part of living in an apartment building? The
fire escape.
It was very illegal to be on the fire escape when there was no fire; but that’s how most folks back then knew their neighbors; by leaning out onto or sitting on the fire escape. More stray cats became Cats With Homes by showing up every day on the fire escape asking for food than any other way I know. The fire escape was a great way to cool off on a hot summer night; the higher you went, the breezier it became. And of course the snowball targetting potential of fire-escapes is not to be surpassed.
So here’s the fire escape system I built. It’s made of strip styrene and premade O-Scale ladders and railings. To give them that authentic “been there for a hundred years, been painted a million times” look, I painted them silver, and then went over them with Tamiya transparent “smoke” paint.
The fire escapes are glued to a set of three bricks each; these can then just be slipped into place in a building. The ladders are not glued to anything; this makes them easier to manage.
I've made better fire-escapes over the years, but alas don't have a picture of one on a Block City building.
Last Update 19 October 2010