Well dear readers, it seems I’m going to have to break that promise about the thrilling report from the track on that first 64-competitor muscle car tournament being run this weekend. I had to work again this Saturday as part of the aftermath of the disaster that called me into the office last weekend and, although I did get Sunday off, I’m going to have to pull a marathon “all hands on deck” weekender with my whole team for the 1st weekend in March. This is more involved than just replacing a piece of failed hardware; I took the opportunity to redesign an insecure network to harden it and add additional security and performance upgrades. It was the right thing to do, but it turned into a very big project; there’s architecture changes involved, and that means testing and troubleshooting…lots of troubleshooting. What could be more fun?
Well actually, what happened on my one day off this weekend wasn’t much more enjoyable, because I almost suffered a major setback on the track construction. I was able to recover from it, but whether or not the recovery is satisfactory remains to be seen. Here’s the ugly story…
Pictured above is my “pit row” as it looked up until about 8:00pm last Saturday night. This consists of 3 identical Greenlight “Weekend Workshop” garages sitting side by side with pit pads and crews in front of them. I was really happy with this when I first set it all up, but there was one thing I wasn’t happy with. You may or may not know that this diorama piece, the “Weekend Workshop”, was made in many different colors with many different decals and logos. I already owned one of them, which I’ve been using for what I call “The Outlaw Garage.” When I decided I wanted to build my pit row using these, I was distressed to discover that it looked like they might be out of production or unavailable; the supply of them on ebay and Amazon, which only months earlier had been plentiful, had suddenly dried up; only a few were available, and most sellers were asking near or over $100 each for them.
This was in the early days of the Wuhan Flu Panic-demic and I figured the issue might have been caused by a supply problem since I’m sure that, like everything else, these products were made in the hostile nation that gifted this virus to the world. Since I needed 3 that were exactly identical, that was also proving impossible through the usual channels, so I went outside the usual channels and finally found a vendor in Wisconsin who had 3 left for sale that were all identical, at the price I used to always see them at everywhere: around $30 each. They were all colored dark gray and had red labels around the tops with a logo reading “Busted Knuckle Garage.”
Well, I thought, whatever: I don’t care about the logo. I have to weather the things anyway to make them look more realistic and as part of that the labels have to come off, so no big deal. Well, late Saturday night after getting home from a 6 hour work day in the trenches, I decided to start on that project, and found it out it was a much bigger deal than I thought…
The labels refused to come off. It was amazing how tenacious they were; I spent an hour with various scraping tools just trying to get one of 4 sides to come off and removing all the adhesive boogers left behind, as no matter how careful I was they tore off in little pieces. Not wanting to spend multiple hours doing this, I decided to do what I always do when I want to remove adhesive and use an eyedropper to coat the decals with acetone.
BAD MOVE!
For some reason, the acetone reacted with the plastic and caused a terrible discoloration. By the time I was done getting all the label remains scraped off, the garages external walls were streaked and stained with whitish blotches. I tried scrubbing the plastic with numerous types of cleaners, even bringing a wire brush to bear, but nothing I could do would clean it up: it appeared to be a permanent discoloration.
Of course I hit the web and looked frantically for a replacement but found the same situation: only a few available here and there, all selling for $100 or more, and none that matched the one I had. I wasn’t going to pay $100 for one, and I certainly wasn’t going to pay that to replace all 3 of them since they all had to be identical. So, it was time to try something else…
What I came up with worked, although its not pretty. I wound up painting all 3 garages with a brick red tempura paint, which, on the dark gray plastic, looks like a muddy brown. But, I would venture to say that, although its not pretty, it is a lot more realistic than the shiny gray plastic I originally had. With them painted this color, my plan now is to “chaulk” them with a white or light beige weathering chaulk in order to fill the cracks between the simulated brick with what (I hope!) will look like cement. I believe that once that’s done, and once I’ve put some equally weathered decals on the walls to resemble old painted on ads, I will have a pit row that looks real, even if it doesn’t look as clean and slick as it originally did.
The tempura paint is completely water soluble, so if I later decide I don’t like this or want to change it, all I have to do is rinse it off and I’m back where I started. Even if this disaster with the acetone hadn’t happened, I still would have needed to do something to weather these buildings; that was always the plan. So for now, I’m leaving them as-is.
Figuring out what to do with the tops of these garages has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced building this track. From the time I first came up with this idea, my plan was to roof them with large covered grandstands to create a look like that seen at LeMans and many other famous European racing tracks, but getting those grandstands has been difficult; the ones I really want, made in the early ‘60’s by Atlas, are extremely hard to find and astronomically expensive, rarely selling for under $150 when they show up on ebay, and they often go for even more than that…and I need 3 of them!
I am currently talking with a guy in BC, Canada who custom builds HO slot track accessories and from whom I have already bought several items; his stuff is expensive too, but its beautifully made, and he’s going to see if he can come up with something that might work for me. In the meantime, this part of the diorama remains woefully unfinished, so I continue looking for something I can buy and build to complete it. This saga is far from over.
I really like the garage interiors and have some potential thoughts on the roof that may work. I’ll try to come up with a prototype to share with you.