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N Scale Trains

HOW TO : Build A Northeastern Scale Models Motor Car Shed           
  Article By Bryan Catley and his Alligator Lines Copyright ©
                                                                                                       
North Eastern Scale Models' Motor Car Shed

The kit is (almost) complete and requires no scratch building skills with everything you will need to complete it being laser cut. The only item missing is the roof shingles. It is a simple and straight forward kit that is easy to put together.

Note: There are a number of very small pieces, so you must be prepared to work with them! I thought I might need some magnifying glasses but I was able to complete it without their assistance. What you will need are some needle nose tweezers!

The kit is of the tab and slot variety, except for the wall corners. Here you must use whatever means available to ensure a square fit!

As with other laser cut kits you need to prepare and paint it before any construction. In this case I decided to leave it in its natural wood finish and then weather it on completion to remove the "just built" appearance.

I followed the instructions quite carefully. There is, however, one deviation I made that you might want to consider as well.

In the previous two kits the windows were constructed by placing the window into the opening (from the rear), ensuring it was flush with the exterior wall, adding the glazing (again from the rear) and then adding the window frame from the front. With this kit the instructions say to build the windows separately and then insert them into the opening (presumably from the front since the frame is bigger than the opening).

This approach didn't seem too good to me so I decided to use the original (windows from the rear) method and it worked very well! If you build this kit (or any other with similar instructions), give the first approach a thought or two!

From that point the kit goes together in a very straight forward manner (and the walls fit into the base using tabs and slots to ensure no mix-ups). The door is designed to slide so be careful when applying the "Z" piece that holds the door from the top. I had already decided that I didn't need to door to actually slide so I wasn't concerned with this piece of construction. (If you would like your door to slide, note there is another piece that goes across the base of the door from behind creating a "slot" for the door to slide in).

The two roof pieces have slots for tabs on the top of the walls. They are designed to only fit in one specific way and there is nothing provided to indicate which goes where! It really did take awhile to figure out which roof piece went where and in what direction! Once I had figured it out, I marked the inside of the roof pieces so I wouldn't have to go through that again!

I did not glue them into place because there were no shingles! The instructions say you can paint the roof if you wish to in which case you would probably glue them into place at this point. (If your door is sliding or will be fixed in an open position, you may wish to paint the interior of the building before gluing the roof pieces).

At this point I decided to weather the building walls. A black wash was first to go on followed by a little more here-and-there. I also used some burnt umber and yellow ochre washes from the stone wall created in the previous project. It ended up looking like a somewhat dirty wood building!

For shingles, I purchased Northeastern's Weathered Gray Random (NSHG6) Shingles (a sheet of shingles that is 2 ¾ x 7 ¾ inches). The instructions recommend using double-faced tape on the sheet, using the roof pieces as a template and then cutting out the pieces with scissors; all because the shingles are "spot" glued and are likely to fall apart when cut if there is nothing to hold them in place. Something else I didn't have so off to the store again!

Note: As of this time, (fall 2007), Northeastern is discontinuing its line of N-Scale Shingles so it will be necessary to find some elsewhere. (I suggest a Google search for "N Scale" Shingles - include the quotes around N Scale). It seems that most of the Northeastern kits do not include shingles. Angelo's Place is an exception.

Off to The Home Depot where I looked at double-faced tape for carpets. This is reinforced tape and is just too thick. In the end I chose Glass-Tac Acrylic Double-Face Tape (right next to the carpet tape); it is two inches wide, clear and thin. This has worked very well!

A piece the length of the shingles was unwound and pressed onto the back of the shingles. As per the instructions I used the two roof pieces as templates and cut them out with scissors.

Note: Use a fairly substantial pair of scissors to cut out the pieces. You'll have a hard time with a small pair! And remember to keep track of the roof pieces and how they fit!

To complete the roof the shingles were fixed to the roof pieces and then the roof pieces were glued in place. You now, of course, have the gap down the peak of the roof to deal with. Luckily, each sheet of shingles has a strip down the edge which is used for just this! Cut a piece the length of the roof, score it lightly down the center and then fold it! It can now be glued into place.

A little black wash on the roof and the shed was finished!