More Progress With Just Plug Lighting

The Just Plug building retrofit project is moving east down Lake St in Zenith. The latest building to be completed is a City Classics Penn Avenue Tile-Front Building that I originally built almost 30 years ago. Because it's so tall and narrow, I wasn't able to install a stick-on LED in the ceiling or light diffusing window film behind the windows without disassembling it. I used an X-Acto blade to pry the corners apart and attached the window film with CA. I find CA works better than the little adhesive blobs they provide in the window film kit.

Unfortunately, the building to the left, a Lytler & Lytler D D Badger Iron Front that's a few years older than the City Classics, doesn't lend itself to such a simple refit and won't be retrofitted. That kit was just the components for the front facade of the building and was designed to take a stack of Roundhouse "Victoria Square" brick buildings to fill out the rest of the model. There's no good way to get back inside to add lighting.

The empty space to the right of the City Classics holds another building that's been taken off the layout for retrofit. Beyond that is another Lytler & Lytler kit, their Lizard Head Hardware.

This one turns out to be one of the few building kits I've assembled that I didn't paint the interior walls black before I built it. You can see the light bleeding through the bricks on the first story. I will need to fix this. I can only light the first story, because I built the kit with an interior floor between the first and second stories, and it would probably damage the kit to try to disassmble it.

For the same reason, if I light the Hotel St George at all, it'll also just be the first story. This was a Magnuson Victoria Falls Hotel, a urethane kit that had become extremely brittle by the time I built it. I don't want to tempt fate doing much work on this one.

I'm pretty enthusiastic about the Just Plug system. You can install lighting in existing buildings with a modular system at fairly reasonable cost, and the results are really visible.