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Union Station My magnum opus. An all-consuming, culminating project that is still not completed after more than 3 years. Lots of "firsts" spawned by this project. |
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West Park Tower No story on the name, other than my wife was at the time working in a building complex in Tyson's Corner called West Park. This was the very first large custom building I made, and is still the tallest at 22 stories. |
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The Berliner No story, and I'll take a better name. It looks like a fancy hotel, and there's one that looks a little bit like this one called the Hotel Berlin, which has the signature green patina pented roof. The facades are not laser-cut, but made from 35mm slide sleeves. (Seriously.) |
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West Park Tower B Just an attempt to basically re-create the first one but using the laser-cut facades. Came out much better. |
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Le Vitre Noir French for "black glass", or "black windows". My greatest failure (to date). This is made from translucent black (very dark bronze tint) acrylic. |
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7-Eleven Complete with slurpee machine graphics, arcade games, and pinball machines. Every Gen-X'er needs one of these! |
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Truth Plaza Gray = black mixed with white. The truth is never black & white, but shades of gray. Mostly, this was a project to provide photos to show that the laser-cut facades could be easily cut to different shapes to make different structures - in this case, a smaller cement-facade building. |
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Tan building (needs a name!) This started as an attempt to make a building to sell directly on eBay, to test the market for a pre- fab building of this size, etc. I timed every piece of the labor involved, to get a sense for how long it takes to make something like this from start to finish. Half-way through, it became obvious that it is far from feasible, most-likely yielding a labor rate near minimum wage (before they raised it). So, I have this neat little tan building... |
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Cousin Suites This is the first "mirror" building, and really just an experiment to see if a mirror-type building could be feasible with the acrylic/mylar sheets and using the venerable and proven square wooden dowels as the structure. This project introduced me to Formula 560 ("Canopy Glue"). It's made of bronze mirror acrylic. Bronze = Copper + Tin = Cu + Sn = Cusn, which looks & sounds like Cousin. Why not? |
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Miramar (ongoing project) This was why Cousin Suites was made - to build a smaller mirror building, developing techniques and principles to be used on the goal: a taller, blue-mirror skyscraper. Named after Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego. (Latin) Mir: to view, or see. Mar: the ocean. The blue mirrors look like they are reflecting the ocean. |
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Conway Bridge
"A Suspension of Disbelief" There is a real Conway Bridge somewhere in England, which is a suspension bridge based on chains, or at least the medieval equivalent of chains. |
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Cell Tower (2.0) My first attempt at this was all-custom, and looked like it. This second version is all laser-cut, and included the development of templates to hold the cell amplifiers in place while gluing them to the triangular frames. I eventually made these available for sale as DIY kits. |
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Black Glass Tower
(Future project, to be named)
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Atlas Switch Tower My take on the popular Atlas kit. |
Neat huh? |
John's Trains & Layout |
Want one? |
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