Building the 1, 2, or 3 Car Garage kit by Railroad Kits. Thanks to Bob Butts for doing the building construction and writing / taking pictures. If this is your first craftsman kit or Railroad Kits purchase Welcome! Thank You for purchasing this kit. The garage can be used anywhere on your HO Layout or Diorama. This is a great place to start if you re building your first wood structure kit. I can be contacted at www.railroadkits.com / Railroad Kits, PO Box 461, Holden, Massachusetts. Or Tel #785-546-0001 First, read through this instruction manual completely before you begin construction. This is a very important step that is key to a successful build. I m assuming you have the basic tools needed: An X-Acto or similar hobby knife, a few #11 blades, a single edge razor blade, various colors of paint, good quality paint brushes, sandpaper of various grades, and glue are all you need. Several other tools are used in the assembly manual that follows. They are optional and are not required to build the basic garage kit. After you ve read through this entire manual, it is time to begin construction. Familiarize yourself with the contents of the kit that you are building: A. I started by removing all of the plastic parts from the sprues using a sprue cutter (a very handy little tool to have on the workbench, but a sharp X-Acto or single edge razor blade will work too). Lots of folks like to leave them on the sprues, paint them that way and remove them as they need them. That works fine too. I just fell into the habit of removing them first. B. After the parts were removed from the sprues I touched up any rough edges from the cuts with a fine emery board. You can use sandpaper too. Only a couple quick swipes are needed. Don't get too carried away. C. I then cleaned the parts in some warm water with some dishwashing detergent mixed in it by scrubbing them gently with a tooth brush. Afterwards I rinsed them in some clean water and set them out to dry.
D. Next the parts were airbrushed first with a coat of Floquil Primer and then, after the paint had cured a day or two, with their final colors. For the 1 car garage I chose Floquil Dark Green. Note that I also airbrushed the garage door pieces with the primer and, one part of it Dark Green and the other part with Floquil Reefer White (the color I chose to use for the walls). You can also use a good quality brush and your favorite brand of paint. NOTE: For an inexpensive alternative, try acrylic craft paints from a store like Michaels, AC Moore, or even Walmart. They come in 100 s of colors and cost less than $2 a bottle. E. I cut the pieces out of the walls where the door and garage door goes. There's only a little piece connecting these so I used a chisel blade in an X-Acto handle to quickly cut through them. A #11 blade would work just as well. F. I touched up the openings with an emery board to make sure they were smooth where I cut them. You can use sandpaper if you don t have an emery board. G. Next is wall bracing. This step strengthens the walls as well as helping to prevent them from warping. I started gluing 5/32" square bracing on the back of the walls. I glue long pieces of bracing onto the back of the walls and then, after the glue has started to set, flip them over and trim them to fit using a sharp, single edge razor blade or the chisel blade in the X-Acto. Place a heavy flat weight on them until the glue has dried to keep them from warping. This is a good idea during bracing, as well as painting. The bracing alone sometimes isn t enough. H. After the walls for the garage were braced and the glue allowed to dry, I stained them, as well as the strip wood I'd be using for the corners, eves, etc. with a medium A&I wash. A&I wash is simply isopropyl alcohol mixed with black India ink. This is a very common weathering / aging stain. Try to use 91% alcohol when making a batch. It contains just 9% water vs. 70% alcohol which has 30% water. Mix just 1 tablespoon of ink to a pint of alcohol. Shake well each time you use it. Ink is available at most craft stores. Higgins is a popular brand of ink. Isopropyl alcohol is available at most grocery, department, or drug stores. I. Next, we ll begin painting the walls. I used PollyScale Reefer White applied by first dipping my brush in water and then in the paint to create a bit of a wash - or watered down paint. This allows some of the A&I mix underneath to peek through the white so it's not so white - I'm going to weather this one car garage pretty heavy.
J. After the walls were painted I added some nail holes (certainly an optional step) using a ponce wheel which is a handy tool available at www.micromark.com and a steel scale ruler. I tried to space them in rows that were a scale 2' apart and around doors and windows. On some of the walls there were places where I wanted a row of nail holes but there was nothing behind the wall to support it. In those instances I took a piece of stripwood the same size as the bracing I used and set the wall on top of it so it was positioned directly underneath where I was going to add the row. K. Next I added the corner trim to the peaked walls. I glued it into place oversized and trimmed it to fit with a razor blade after the glue had set. L. Next lets glue the doors and windows in place. This part is easy (well, it all is easy really), put a little glue on an applicator (you can use a toothpick), apply it to the openings and press the window or door in place. You can also cut and glue the acetate (windows glass) to the back of the doors & windows at this time. See image N below. M. I opted to line the opening for the garage door with scale 2" by 8" boards - I added this after the garage door was glued in place. The garage door should fit into the opening perfectly. N. Next we ll assemble the 4 walls. I glued an end wall to a side wall and made sure they stayed square to one another while they dried. I made two halves like this and then, when the glue had set, glued the two halves together. Notice that the acetate (window glass) is now in place as well.
O. I glued on the roof card after the glue from the 4 walls had a good time to dry. After allowing the roof card glue to dry, I added some trim to the roof using scale 2" by 8" boards painted my trim color. Glue these on as shown here and then allow them to dry thoroughly. If you re thinking I sure do spend a lot of time watching glue dry, then this is a good time to be visiting the Railroad Kit Forums and saying hello or just seeing what everyone else is building! http://www.mrrforums.com P. It s time to roof our garage! (If you prefer, inexpensive self-adhesive 3-tab asphalt style shingles are available on the Railroad Kits website.) Included in the garage kit is simulated tar roofing paper. You can apply white or yellow glue, and work your way up from each side. Then finish with a ridge cap. For the photo s in this instruction manual I m using 3M brand 465 transfer tape. Transfer tape is simply double sided tape, but very thin. You ll apply your roofing material the same way except you may be using glue instead. Transfer tape makes it really easy to neatly add the rolled roofing material. First I press a piece of the transfer tape on and then trim to it to fit. After the entire roof was covered the backing of the transfer tape was removed to expose the sticky surface of the roof. The rolled roofing will be added from the bottom up and overlapped slightly just like a real roof would be covered. For roofing material the black paper that came with the kit can be cut into scale 2 to 3' strips and painted to the desired color. I just happen to have a stash of scale 3 strips of very fine grit wet/dry sandpaper that I painted a light gray so I substituted that instead to save myself the cutting. Besides, the fine sandpaper has a nice texture to it so you may want to get some and try it. Be sure to overlap the bottom edges of the roof card as well as the front and back edges. Not every strip has to go from edge to edge. In the 3 rd picture below notice how I m adding a shorter strip to create a seam where one roll ended and another started. Although this shows the images of building the one car version, the steps are virtually the same to assemble the two & three car versions. A few things to consider are: 1. The roof card gets bracing on the two & three car garages. 2. How do you want to brace the walls around the garage doors? You can brace them after you install the garage doors, or you can brace them first and then trim the cardstock doors to fit in-between the bracing. As shown below, I ve opted to brace it after installing the doors. Just be aware that you ll want to protect the walls from warping during the staining / painting steps. The Bracing Diagrams for two and three car versions are on the next page. (Page 5)
Thank You Again! I hope you enjoyed building the garage you purchased. Railroad Kits has a complete line of structure kits from the beginner levels on up through to those that have been building craftsman structures for years and enjoy the challenge of a more complex building project. Also, thanks to Bob for the basis of these instructions, which I modified slightly. Be sure to join in on my Model Railroad Forum website http://www.mrrforums.com where you ll see & learn more tips and techniques that will help improve your modeling skills. I encourage you to share your skills with us too. ENJOY! Jimmy Deignan