Structure Mock-Up: Walthers Industry Office

This is the third Walthers building I've thought about including on my small office shelf layout. I found it while searching for the others and thought it might be a nice addition to one of the corners of the layout opposite of whichever large building I decide to go with. Plus, this is a really cheap kit so it might be a good one for me to practice with.

Walthers Industry Office building kit.

Instead of making prints with the computer, I decided to do it the old fashioned way this time and got out some graph paper and a pencil. I took the overall dimensions listed above and started drawing the four sides of the building. Since I was unable to get very detailed dimensions from anywhere on the internet, I was assumed the back is flat and the steps on the front are not parts of the 4.75" dimension. For a mock up, I think this will be alright, but I know there is going to be some discrepancy between mine and the real thing. I will just have to hope its close enough. I did find a YouTube video showing this kit being assembled and it looks like there is a storage shack that sticks off the back a bit, so I could probably leave that out if I really need to so I can squeeze it onto the layout.

A look at the four sides of the building drawn on paper.

Once I had everything drawn out, I cut the paper down a bit and glued it onto the back of another cereal box. The next step was cutting the pieces out with an Xacto knife. I used a straight edge to help keep everything nice and square. The only difficult part about this step was working with a well-used blade, so some of the cuts did not come out as clean as I had hoped. Its only a mockup, so its not all that critical anyway.

Starting to cut the pieces out with an Xacto knife.

The easy part was doing the outside perimeter cuts. The hard part was getting to the doors and windows I decided to put on the front and sides of the building. I know I don't really need them, but it seemed more fun to do it with them. Once I had the four pieces, I glued them together with some Gorilla glue, which led me to my first real problem: there was noting to keep the walls from bending and collapsing this way. To fix that, I cut and glued in a piece of styrene poster board at the bottom. This gave it some structure as well as a nice flat bottom.

A look at the four sidewalls glued to the styrene poster board base.

The next step was putting the roof on. I thought this would be easy until I realized I actually needed it to be set down just under the tops of the side walls. That led me to cutting some support pieces out of some extra wooded barbeque skewers I had laying around. These worked pretty well to support the roof piece once everything was glued in place.

A look at the supports I added for the roof.

The rest was easy, all I had to do was cut the roof piece to size and glue it in place. Again, this is only supposed to be a mockup so I don't need any real level of detail. I just needed to have something to place on the layout to see if this is in fact a kit I would like to include. Here is how it looks on the layout.

A look at the finished mockup on the actual layout.

That's it for this one. I'm thinking I want to go ahead and buy this kit just to have something to try out. It sells for around $15 so I may even end up with two just in case I mess something up. Now I just need to decide if I want to look into any other structures, or call it good and go with this and the Commissary building so I can get moving on this thing.