Its nearly there

Most of the floors are in now apart from the top two.  I have managed to pick up some working lights from a club mate, so I can lose the plastic ones.

 

 

 

 

The finished build is just around the corner, honestly....

Car Park Part 2 - More progress

When at the club last night I managed to get a bit more done on the car park.  With the ground floor complete and two of the side walls on, it was time to start putting together the upper floor together.

The instructions are very well laid out, and so are the spur's.  You don't have little bits left here and there, as you complete each part of the instructions you empty each spur.  Which is magic for me, as I have a habit of losing bits.

Every Building on the layout will be lit,  one to show off the detail inside, and two am basing this layout in the evening about 8pm (I know, pretty precise).  The reason for this, is the football stadium, will have a match just about to start.  That way it would be normal to have fans still coming into the Stadium, so it can be nearly full inside and have fans outside.  As all the loco's and most of the coach comes with lights this will also show of them as well.

 The car park will be in the city near the station, I have decided it will be late night shopping night in the centre, so it is going to be full, as there are 200 spaces, its a lot of cars, and lots of people about.

A friend of mine Ross, has shown me his way of lighting N-Scale Buildings.  So this is how I will do it here.  Each level of the car park is split with an upper and lower floor per level, but both sides connect to the stair column at one end.  In the top picture above you can see I have drilled some holes to take the wires from the lighting out under the base.

I have started with the floor straight above the entrance to the car park and felt this would have the most light, as this is where you enter and pay to leave.  I first cut away part of the ceiling ribs to allow the LED light strip to be fixing to the roof as flat as possible.  The lighting strip is in Sets of three lights with each set already having a resistor attached.  The back of the strip is self adhesive, but Ross informed me that when the strip gets hot it has a habit of un-attaching itself, so I added a little super glue to help keep it in place. 











I cut away a small area to allow the wires to come from the lighting strip to the stairwell without being seen.  The lighting strip his two points marked to show you were to attach the wires.  As I had not soldered in a while I was hoping not to blow any of the lights by adding too much heat, but I am very pleased to say that all went ok.

 The LED lighting strips can be bought on E-bay for about £10 for 300 LED's in lots of different colours, the one I have used here is warm white.  If you require the lighting to be a bit more duller, you can add a resistor in the size you require to achieve the affect you want.  As the above photo shows I didn't kill the LED's and I think they look pretty good.

The next step was to add the barriers and cars to the level.  I will be adding people to this building, but as I am still moving this around and nothing is attached I will add them when I come to fix the levels in place, so they are less likely to be damaged.  

I then did the same for the level above, but I used less lighting strips, only 2 sets of 3, instead of 4 sets of 3, so there will be a little less light on the floors above.

While I was flying along, putting the barriers in and cars I forgot to add the arrow decals on the floor, so I will have to add these in before I get to carried away.

I am very pleased with my progress so far on this build, and look forward to completing the rest of the floors.



More will follow as the build moves on, until then I wonder if its possible to built a car park like this on the layout?????

Finally Building Kits - Carpark

Thank god,  After weeks of woodwork, cutting, nailing and sticking Insulation down, I have finally started building some kits.  I don't have a drop of track down but I hope that will change over the next few weeks.

So I have started to build the multi-Story car park.  I will be taking my time and detailing the inside with cars, people and lights.  I am also looking to add a shopping centre cross from the car park, with a high level walkway linking to two buildings, and the road network passing below.  I just need to find a kit for a shopping centre now.   I was thinking of putting this beside the football stadium at first, but I have decided to put it in the city.

This E-bay shop below sells, N Scale - People, Cars, Buses, Fencing, Lights and lots of neat stuff,  I can vouch for the cars and the people being of good quality as I have bought a few, but not sure about anything else.

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/everydaygoodz

 I bought 500 people and 150 Cars, delivery was very fast from Japan and very well packaged.  I am planning to have two rows of lights on each level on the car park, with the wires hidden down the stairwell. 

After opening up the box I was pleased to see the Instructions are also in English and very well laid out.  There is a full transfer sheet with all the road markings and signs needed to complete the kit.  The signs outside I am going to try replace with Neon signs if I can find something suitable, or make something myself.  I will be building this Kit at my clubrooms on Wednesdays nights, so it might take a while, but at least when I am there I will have something to keep me busy. 

Here we have the ground floor, Once cleaned up from removing off the spur the white road markings are required to be put on.  Thankfully the parking space's already have there white lines done, and its just the arrows that are needed to be added on the road.  There are a lot of decals on this kit, but they are very marked and are shown clearly when they are needed.  I have drilled two holes in the base of the stairwell to take the wires for the lighting.

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23/05/2013

Last night I completed the ground floor of the Carpark, I have all the holes drilled to take the wire from the lights, and cars are glued in place, some of the cars are a bit rough, so they have been placed in the middle, and not so easily seen.












The next step is to take two sides of the spur, clean them up and add the decals, ready to install on the ground floor.

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I will update as the build continues.......