Fishing for tips here:
I’ve got a batch of modern Plasticville by Bachmann I’m going to assemble.
Do you use glue? Or something else?
What kind of glue, if glue?
Do you paint and/or weather your buildings or build them unmodified?
Tenax 7R works really well. It’s a solvent based cement . Dries quick. Every hobby shop carries it. I like the molded plastic colors. johnnyc
I’ve done several Plasticville kits and use what my Dad called “airplane glue”. Or I’ll use superglue to tack it together and then firm it up with Testors plastic model cement.
I paint and weather and detail them. I hope I’m getting better at it:
I like to paint them. Best cement I have found is Ambroid Proweld. Not all hobby shops carry it but the ones that cater to the plastic model crowd will have it.
I use ordinary white glue, like Elmers. It holds the parts together fine, but will disolve with water if you ever want to disassemble the kit for some reason.
Jim
Great ideas fellows, thanks!
Whether to paint or leave them alone depends on the look you’re after. If you want a traditional toy train layout, the unpainted plastic is fine. If you’re wanting more realism or you want your layout to look a bit different (one criticism I’ve heard is that all layouts with Plasticville on them tend to look pretty much alike), then painting them can neatly solve that. I lke acrylic paints because they’re cheap, dry quickly, and clean up with soap and water.
I have used HO Plasticville (since it was first introduced many years ago) on various layouts and my preference was to use the items as produced. With age, some of the structures do un-snap. My choice would be, as Jaabat suggested, a glue like Elmers that would be easily dissolved. All the best.
I have a Water Tower with hinged spout and a tiny eyelet above it at the top of the tank. Anyone have an original pic showing what kind of stringing the mfr had in mind? The plastic hinge is fairly stiff, the spout remains up w’out any string to it.[%-)
I have a Plasticville Water Tank that was given to me as a child. I don’t recall ever seeing any kind of string on mine. There is no mention of a string on this page of the Water Tank’s parts:
http://www.tandem-associates.com/plasticville/watertank.htm
You could try contacting the above website’s owner to see if they have any knowledge of a string.