I bought a few Craftsman Kits over a period of time in the early to mid 1990s. I assembled a #57 Campbell Railroad Station Kit early on, the rest have been on the shelf until a rainy day. Well it seldom rains in Bakersfield so I finally decided to do it to it even without the rain.
The old Babe's Diner will be remodeled and installed across the road from my railroad station as a cafe. Doug got the new building for his Diner and Susie is getting a completely remodeled Babe's Diner as her Cafe. My daughter Susan died in 1991 a week before her 21st birthday in a robbery.
I moved pretty fast during construction of the basic building as you can see in the picture above. The building is assembled and has some of my scratch built cafe equipment installed. I used FolkArt Oak Acrylic Crafters Stain on the walls and tinted the Oak with FolkArt Walnut Stain at 15 drops of Oak to 1 drop of Walnut.
The figures are not glued in place, I super glue my figures to .024" diameter #21 straight pins to paint them and then drill .025" with a #72 drill bit where I want to place the figure. If depth isn't a factor then I leave the pin full length otherwise I cut it.
The figures in this building have the mounting pins cut off to ¼" because the floor depth is 5/16".
As you can see it's coming along nicely. This kit is definitely not for the beginner. It's relatively easy until you get to the wall alignment stage.
This shows the card stock roof with the shingle alignment lines. The shingles are made from 3/16" wide heavy brown paper and comes in a long roll. The shingles have glue on the back of them.
This picture shows the under side of the roof with 2mm 12 volt lamps glued in place with Goop. I will run a pair of bare #24 wire around the roof to connect the lights to the power connector rods.
The next several pictures show the roof setting on the walls and the final check before gluing it in place.
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The picture below shows the Diner with customers. All the tables and seating are in place with customers waiting on food.
There is a problem, there's no kitchen yet.
I made the bench seats from a combination of balsa and basswood. I found the ideal counter stool, a sewing pin with the round plastic ball on the end. I used my Dremel tool with a sanding wheel to make it a half ball on a pin. The bright colors help as a stool seat and the pin it's self looks like a chrome pipe.
The customers are unpainted Preiser figures that I spent hours painting with Crafters Acrylics.
In the picture above food and drink have been served, the food is painted the drinks are 1/16" piece of #24 telephone frame wire. I stripped 1/16" of insulation off of a ⅛" piece of single conductor wire leaving 1/16" with insulation (glass or can) above the table/counter top and a 1/16" in a .02" hole in the table/counter top to hold it in place.
This close up shows the details of the beverage containers and food.
This kit has very good detail parts, one being the wrought iron ornamental Corbel porch roof brackets.
The picture above shows a post with a Corbel bracket.
In the picture above you can see some of the super details in this kit. Note the fine detail of the patterned basswood, shingles, architectural wrought iron corbels and railing.
In the pictures above and below some of the shingle strips have been glued in place.
The Classic Miniatures Instructions say to use a wet sponge to wet the glue on the back of the shingles, Campbell Kits say the same but that's a disaster. The card stock roof will become too wet and warp badly, I found out that the hard way building my Campbell Station. I now use Aleene's Wood glue with great results, it's much faster not near a messy and no warping.
My Diner is finished and the following pictures show the results of my venture.
This is the finished building, customers are happy, the lights and animated sign work as planned.
