Lighting the Aoshima Apartments

Quinntopia is one of the N Scale blogs I follow and has some great tutorial posts on LED lighting for buildings including this model and is worth taking a look at if you are considering some building lighting.

I decided on my building to fully light the stairwells and just a few of the apartments.  There was a small indent on each floor that seemed perfect for a porch light. I drilled a small hole to one side of each of those and pushed the wires of pre-wired surface mount (SMD) LED's through with a bit of Walthers Goo on the backside of the LED to hold it in place.

In the past I have not had too much experience or luck working with the small wires that are attached to these small LEDs.  I thought the best way would be to land them on a PC board so I cut out a small section that would fit into one of the apartment sections.  I wired  2.2K ohm resistors on the board for each LED for a total of 10.

To light the apartments I used bright white LED boards that came from Atlas engines that I installed had DCC decoders in.  These boards already have a current limiting resistor.  After experimenting  I got the best results by attaching the board to the ceiling and bending the LED down as shown in this photo.

This photo shows an overall view of all the wiring and other electronic parts that are now inside the building before the walls go on. 

Styrene view blocks were added so the wiring won't be seen from the other side of the building which is going to face outward on the module.

Here is this building with the sides and roof added and the lights on.  The porch lights are partly blocked by the stairs but the stairs are illuminated which is the effect I was after.  5 apartments are lights with LEDs of various shades.

Building the Aoshima Apartments

The kit comes with easy to follow instructions.  In the first steps they have you assemble the internal floors and walls and the walls around the stair towers. The stairs were the same color as the walls which I did not think realistic so I brush painted them with Floquil Concrete.


The color of the base did not look to me like concrete so I airbrushed this with Floquil Concrete.

I also installed two 4-40 screws through the base for mounting this building on the module as explained in the post Attaching Buildings.


The largest part of building this kit is installing the windows, balconies, and railings on the wall sections.  I found that everything in this kit fits together very well as long a you are careful to smooth the connections to the spues.



The kit comes with a decal set with window coverings both opened and closed that are meant to be applied to the inside of the windows.




The internal walls and floors come with openings that allow for installing interior lighting.  This should be done before installing the exterior wall assemblies.  After testing how the lighted building might look, I decided that I would set up some LED's inside some of the internal compartments of the building.

To be continued.

A new building kit

Recently I was looking on ebay for some additional figures (people) for the Musashi-Koyama modules when I came across a large apartment building kit that I had never seen before from a company that I had not heard of before, Aoshima.  I searched for this name and found out that this kit had been released in late 2009.  The full name of the company is Aoshima Bunka Kyozi which my wife tells me translates as Green or Blue Island Cultural Manufacturing.



So I purchased the kit and several sets of figures and they arrived within about 2 weeks. This kit came in a box that was approximately 13 x 8 x 4 inches.

There are about 14 spue sets in the kit, each in its own bag, plus step by step pictorial instructions and some stickers.  This photo shows about half of the parts that come with this kit.

Many of the parts in this kit have already been air brush painted.  Shown here are the railings for the balconies.  Some other painted details include pipes on the roof, window frames, and vents on the walls.  Looking over all the parts spues nothing seems to have that plastic look to it.


Two sets of stair towers are included.  I wish someone would offer pre-molded stair sets just by themselves for us kit bashers and scratch builders.

There are other nice touches to this kit like interior floors and walls, a hole between floors for lighting,  This is going to be great fun to build.

I have just the place for this apartment building on the Musashi-Koyama modules as shown highlighted in violet.

Buying on ebay: I purchased this kit from the ebay seller plazajapan in Osaka.  I have purchased from them several times and they have always been reliable.  Another good ebay seller of Japanese N scale items  that I have purchased from is hit-japan in Sapporo.

Exterior stairways

Exterior stairways are quite common on buildings in Japan.  When I built my model of the 6 story "Mr. Donut" building, I left the stairs off.  Lately I've decided that it really needed the stairs to make it look right and have been working on those.

This photo on the left shows the prototype building.  Close examination of this and other photos shows that the stairs are the open frame type with a mesh type screen over the railing.









This photo shows my model of the building as it is now, without the stairway.  The highlighted area is where the stairway will be added.  I need to match the existing building tile.












Plastruct makes a line of products in N and HO scales to model industrial stairway.  I've used these before and would use them for the basis of this project.











Here is what I have so far.  I started with a .020 sheet of styrene.  Then I laminated the tiled styrene over that with gaps where the doors would be.  Except for the bottom and top flights, all the stairs are in.  The Plastruct railings are used for the inside and .020 x .250 styrene strip for the outside as seen between floors 2 and 3.




I'll make another post on this in the future showing how it came out when it's done and attached to the building.

Scratch built apartment building

There was a need for an apartment building in that cluster of buildings on the right end of the scene that would need to be scratch built.  I've always enjoyed DPM (Design Preservation Models) kits and wanted to try a similar technique to the building I needed.  As the apartments would be a repeating pattern I could make just a couple of masters and molds and then as many resin castings as needed for the structure.  A styrene box was made that the castings would be attached to.  In this case only one side of the building would be visible.

The two wall castings that are mirror images.   I used a mix of available N scale parts and scratch building techniques to create these two masters.  Then RTV rubber molds were made from these.


Here's a view of one of the castings that I made for this building along with the dimensions.  The visible part of the building needed 15 castings total, 5 like this one with the door on the right and 10 with the door on the left.


Here the castings have been glued to the box.  Balconies are added and railings made from Plastruct HO scale ladder stock.  The whole building has been given a base coat of paint.  This photo also appears in the October 11, 2010 post Attaching Buildings II.


This is a more recent look at this building after most of the details have been painted in.  Some people might find this hand painting of details to be tedious but I like it because it's something I can do just bit on when ever I have a few spare minutes.  All the balconies offer many detailing opportunities that will come in the future.


The location of this building on the module set is highlighted in violet on this map.

Module Progress Map

I have started a new page that is called the Module Progress Map.  I made a graphic map of the modules and divided it up into 14 scenes.  Each scene is color coded depending on how far it is completed.

• RED = Under 25% complete
• YELLOW = 25% to 75% complete
• GREEN = Over 75% complete

As things progress I will add an updated map to the page.  Also, in some of the posts I will be showing the map with the area referenced in the post indicated.

Paint & weathering for the Station

With everything settled on the platform I have gone on to painting and weathering the scratch built station along with the 3 modified Kato covered stairways. 

Here's a view from the other side that shows the weathering applied to the roofs of the station, the stairways, and the platform awnings. 

Notice the fence and walkway leading away from the stairs.  This will be right along the front edge of the module.  There will be passengers walking along there a perhaps some food cart vendors.


These station signs on the platforms were made on the computer and printed on white decal paper.  They are attached to the existing sign boards that hang down from the platform awning.

At this point the station and platform areas are done except for adding details and of course populating them with passengers.