I decided to make my second blog entry tonight. I've been working the last couple of afternoons and part evenings on creating a building kit made by Custommodelrailroads.com I bought 4 kits from them and this one is the smallest, called the The Fidelity and Guaranty Company Building with 3 add on kits for it.

I was excited to get these and upon starting this building I have to say they are pretty easy to put together although you need to be careful in somethings when putting this building together.

A. Don't glue the entire building together with out painting it. As you can see in my first photo I've got one add on kit done, though no windows, no weathering, no building details and I still have to add two more extension kits to it. The way I did this was per the instructions...especially for the first one. I put each module together minuse the window frames. I painted the completed modules and the window frames seperately. At first I painted them a white sating Krylone fusion paint so to act as a primer. Then I hand painted the modules and the window frames seperately. once I did an additional 3 coats of paint for both parts I then glued the window frames behind the modules. It works well just don't add too much glue or the paint will run into the seems and ruin the paint on the edges of the window frames and building facade.

B. if this is your first CMR kit make sure you follow the instructions thoroughly. It'd be very easy to make a mistake.

The detailing is really nice on this building. However I'm a bit disappointed with the scale. It seems to me when measuring this building so far next to my current buildings that it seems a bit underscale. It's not to the point where it looks out of place but putting my current unfinished Fidelity building beside my Hilton hotel it does a bit. So I'll have to be careful as to what buildings I put this beside. Currently my Fidelity Building is "the building" and one add on kits currently reaching 9 inches in height. When completed it will be almost exactly 19 stories and 14.5 inches. Today most office buildings in Current North American cities is about 12 to 13 feet or about one inch in N scale. So in doing some math on my other buildings this building will fit in nicely with some of my other models which have similar floor heights.

To be honest this isn't a horrible thing as if you ever look at cities the variences in heights between buildings of the same story limit is quite amazing. For instance I live in Victoria Canada. It's a medium size city and is the capital of B.C. Unfortunately Victoria has some of the most strict height limits of any city it's size. That being said we have lots of mid rise buildings. I bring this up because there's a building called the Orchard House http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1284/1026623446_c035b1c362_b.jpg which was built in the 1960's it's height is 204 feet... I hate meteric...grrr and is 22 stories tall. We also have a CIBC Bank tower at only 12 stories tall http://farm1.static.flickr.com/216/523026957_2efbab0cce_o.jpg This building measure 165 feet in height and a newly underconstruction condo at 24 stories is coming in at 238 feet.

So the CIBC bank (1976) office is.............. 13.75 feet per floor,
The Orchard House condos (1969) is ....... 9.27 feet per floor,
The New Hudson Condo tower (2010)...... 9.92 feet per floor.
Fidelity Building N scale............................... 10.18 feet per floor. (should be in the 12 foot range)

I've measured the floor ratio for the Fidelity building at 19 stories and at 14.5 inch at 1:160 scale and I've got.. 10.18 feet per floor.

So not bad for a condo but a little under scale for the era.

All being said, it's a great building with a fantastic design, rigid construction, flawless detail, awesome tollernance and easy to construct if done properly.

I'm excited to see how the other buildings turn out. I'm going to add some cool details such as trees, aging, people, awnings, signs, roof details, and excitedly the next two add on kits.

Cheers,
Bob