East Theater, Part 2 of 3

Being stainless steel, the facade naturally had to be assembled using cyanoacrylate. Because it was made up from so many small parts, many of the joints were reinforced with styrene scraps to keep things strong and true. Stainless steel is also much harder to manipulate, requiring the use of a Dremel tool for cutting and shaping.

The little ticket booth proved to be the biggest problem. The original theater kit ticket booth was ugly and very difficult to bend. I was going to make a new one using the front of City Scoop kit, which looked like a natural choice, but it was too wide. Then I tried making it out of a leftover car wash door, but it still looked too much like a door. This issue remains unresolved at present.

To be honest, I wasn't sure this little Frankenstein's Monster was going to work. I felt that the animated sign was still too big, the marquee was too squat, and the entrance too much of a kluge. Then I flipped through my stockpile of theater images to reassure myself that I was still in the ballpark. It wasn't until I started actually assembling the facade that I began feeling confident enough to press on with the project.

The two animated signs were sandwiched together with two pieces of double-stick foam tape and a piece of sheet styrene such that the assembly matched the width of the notch in the marquee, which originally accommodated the big pink elephant sign. The bottom of the non-animated portion of the neon sign was actually embedded inside the marquee to make everything as compact as possible, so that the animated sign didn't appear grossly oversized.

A note about these signs: they are very delicate. After all of the frequent handling of modifications and test-fitting, one of the conductors started giving out. Rather than spend the money on a replacement, I decided to let it fail intermittently, just as the equivalent parts in a real sign would.

Thanks to the theater's simple name, I was able to produce a more realistic neon effect by making color-graded artwork, which was then printed on decal paper, sprayed with fixative, and applied to the sign. I made lots of extras knowing full well that the black areas of one decal would not be dense enough to be opaque. Two was barely adequate; three would have been better, but it would have added too much thickness to the sign. So I helped it along in places with a black Sharpie, then sprayed the whole sign with clear fixative to try and blend everything together.

The letters and simulated lettering tracks for the marquee were drawn using software and printed on white decal paper with an inkjet printer. The decals were applied to clear styrene, which was cut down to size and sandwiched in between the stainless steel top and bottom marquee parts.

For the lights over the entrance, I drilled a series of small holes in the bottom half of the marquee and installed short bits of flared fiber optic material. The fibers simply end inside the marquee, where they pick up light from the white LEDs that illuminate the marquee sign.

To make the illuminated display windows, I cut pieces of Plexiglas slightly larger than the windows, and drilled shallow holes along the edges to simulate lights; thus a couple of white LEDs could illuminate dozens of faux bulbs. Reduced movie posters were glued to the backs of the display windows, and backed with aluminum foil to keep light from leaking through the posters.

The main components of the facade are readied for assembly.

The assembled entrance is propped up in place on the layout for evaluation.

The animated signs are sandwiched together with double-stick foam tape.

This is a sample of the actual artwork rendered for the signs and the marquee.

It takes two decals to build up enough density in the black areas to be opaque.

The signs are printed on white decal paper and applied to clear styrene.

The animated sign is installed on the completed marquee.

After attaching the entrance to the marquee, everything is evaluated again.

The single most difficult step in the entire project was edging the sign with stainless steel. Fortunately I have an obscene collection of etched metal products, and among some Ndetail.de N scale detailing kits were some perfectly-sized frets; not only that, the stainless was much thinner and easier to work than that of the Micro Engineering kits.

Knowing in advance that I could never hope to bend a single part that exactly followed all of the convoluted contours of the entire sign, I made the edging from four separate parts, each one shaped to wrap around a corner or a curve, and meeting at points that would require reverse or inside bends. Because the bottom of the sign was embedded in the marquee, the edging was attached to the sign after the facade was assembled.

As of 5 October 2008, this is where the project stands. More as it happens.

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