APBP’s Big Western Paper Kit

POOLSIDE RAILS

Where Paper Crafting and Model Railroading Collide

Building APBP’s Big Western Paper Kit

This HO scale paper house kit looks great in any modern era model railroad layout. It’s easy and quick to build, and we got TWO of them!

One nice thing about the APBP site is that you get to try a free house kit for, well, free. It builds into a nice looking American prototype tract house from the 1960’s. We decided to try another paper kit from this online publisher, the Big Western.

Although the paper kit’s name makes it sound like a cheeseburger, the download, for which we paid $3.95, is surprisingly well designed. You get parts and instructions for two complete houses, in two different colors and, interestingly enough, two different floor plans. This “reversed” design allows you to make a whole street of houses from just this one kit. Since you own the PDF, you can print as many houses as you want.

We chose to build the pink house in our paper kit – the orange house will have to wait for another day. We could presumably open the PDF in an image manipulator, like GIMP or Photoshop and change the colors to whatever we wanted… in fact, you could make a bazillion different houses just by changing the color.

The house builds quickly and easily into an attractive, sturdy HO scale structure. One thing we noticed is that is very important to open the slots in the straight wall without the chimney. The angled garage structure fits over this wall, and its tabs fit into these slots. Once installed, you can glue the tabs from the inside of the house to get the garage to fit snugly up against the main structure.

Before you put the roof on you will want to assemble that complex inset porch. It looks really nice on the finished model, but it takes a degree of papertecturing to get it to fit properly. The house’s front steps reach over and straddle the front door sill. Make sure you cleanly cut the entryway out of the wall before you install the porch. Cut it with a fresh blade in your hobby knife.

Once it’s done, the Big Western House is an attractive and stylish HO scale structure that is surprising compact. A little super-detailing, a little greenery around the edges, and a few accessories and you’ll have a nice addition to your model railroad layout.

The Big Western is just one of the paper kits for download you can find at ABPB, the American Paper Buildings Project site. You can find GIMP software, which is a free open-source code image manipulation program, from the link at PaperTecture or at their own site, GIMP.org.

Paper Building Kits