Progress on the Drive-In

Here's some more shots of the 1920's Drive-In Market (or what we'd call a strip mall) in progress. The walls have all been glued together, but I still need to glue on the main roof, and paint it to simulate a tar and gravel roof.

Overall, I'm more impressed than I expected. The model isn't the best model I've ever done; it's pretty easy to see the places where the diagonal extruding pattern is visible, and some of the detail's a bit rough. However, I'm really pleased how easy it was to make identical parts, and the roughest piece - the storefronts that I left pretty much as they appeared from the printer - look pretty decent from about three feet away. (See my Makerbot blog for a detailed view of the storefront and some of the tricks I used to get them more acceptable.)

Even more importantly, it was easy to steal the design of the roofline from the arched walls, and reuse it in the tower's roofline. It would be pretty easy to follow the Spanish Revival theme with other wall patterns, just like Design Preservation Miniatures wall sections let you do for brick buildings. I was even thinking of replacing the end walls with a solid wall section matching the arched wall. Luckily, I decided (1) I wanted to finish this model, and (2) the Drive-In Markets were probably inexpensive enough that the real builder would have left the walls plain, too.