Another card building for my WW2 city board

Although I haven't posted for a couple of weeks I have been busy working on my terrain. So here's a look at another card building I've made for my board. This is one is the 'Market House' from Superquick and cost £6.70 inc p&p.

The contents of the kit.

As with the Metcalfe kit I did previously the kit comes as sheets of pre-punched card which are glued together. The card isn't as thick as with Metcalfe buildings and the instructions, although adequate, are not as good as those you get from Metcalfe. So on to the build.

The walls and arches ready for assembly

The first job is to cut out the acetate windows and fix the to the walls. On the Metcalfe kits there's lots of spare acetate to apply glue to, making it easy to attach the windows. Here there's very little acetate 'spare' which makes gluing very difficult. In the end I used a small amount of glue on one edge to hold them in place and then ran Sellotape over the window to hold it in place.

The next job was to assemble the arches. You have to bend and glue the arch structure which is then glued to the outside walls. This was very fiddly and as you will see in later pictures it was difficult to get things to stay lined up while the glue set. Although the windows & arches were not insurmountable problems I can't help feeling that the design has been done down to a price and that it would have been done better if it was a Metcalfe kit.

The assembled arches

The front view

The next step was to add the floor to the upper level. The floor piece is too small for the opening but as it's designed to be covered by a fixed roof for a railway layout I suppose it doesn't matter. But as I am leaving the roof separate to allow figures to be placed inside it does bother me.

The ill fitting first floor

I glued the model to the supplied base and then moved on to the roof. The roof was easy to assemble but the clock tower was fiddly and I'm not totally happy with it. At this stage the model is more or less finished except for some optional details. I decided to block up the arches at the rear of the building and I added a plaque on the middle one to add some flavour. With that the model was finished

The rear of the building showing the blocked in arches and plaque

Side view

The front of the finished building.

Overall I'm happy with how it turned out. It's a decent size with the building itself being 5" x 4". It was more of a pain than the Metcalfe kits to build plus the card has a satin sheen to it, that I'm not keen on, rather than the flat matt finish of the Metcalfe ones. I may try a spray of matt varnish to tone it down. On the plus side the bricks and roof already have a weathered effect which looks quite nice. I may buy other models from Superquick but only if Metcalfe don't have what I need in their range.