I really enjoyed seeing the article for a small factory built with mat board and index cards, demonstrating how good looking models can be built with cheap materials. ( I also see two related threads on this forum).
It has motivated me to try this approach and I hope the magazine will publish similar articles in the future.
Nobody said that model buildings HAVE to be made out of balsa, bass wood or styrene.
Many here used various forms of single layer card boarding to build things.
When I was younger, I actually built buildings for O-O/27 and actually took cereal boxes and used them diversely in construction.
In order to determine HOW a building would look in O O/27, i made mock ups out of cardboard first, often they, too, found to be of use on the layout.
I built a factory building for O-O/27 out of two different sized Kodak boxes {thick like carboard cigar boxes} stacked on top each other, a corner of a cereal box attached to the side as an office, and used large wooden dowels form a childs wood building set as smoke stacks. It looks very convincing as a Kodak factory {I cut the Kodak label off to glue on the painted outside as a sign board}. Gee I wonder where that is now? I am sure it is still packed away at my father’s house.
3x5 or 5x7 index Flash cards are a good source of “wood” for building, of course.
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Actually, if you’re crafty about it, styrene is cheaper than mat board.
If you walk into a hobby shop, no styrene is not cheaper than mat board you can get over at Michael’s.
But if you buy a large sheet from US Plastic online, it works out to 205 sq in per dollar for .040 thick styrene versus about 185 per dollar for mat board from other sources. Wholesale mat board backfires on you. The only wholesalers I found required large purchases (25 32x40 sheets at $2.95 per sheet) whereas US Plastic will dole out a single 40x72 sheet. Price varies on thickness, of course, and you can get many of the same thicknesses that Evergreen and Plastruct sell.
what i found interesting about the articles were that the materials were commonly available.
But I also liked what he said about the cardboard materials taking paint unevenly, so it didn’t look like a plastic model !