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Building a Diorama from Scratch

Now a word about some elements used in the building phase. I am fortunate to have on-hand a large variety of Grandt Line (photo 1.3) plastic scale windows, ledges, doors, and frames. These wonderful items can often be found for sale in scale dollhouse stores, hobby shops, or if all else fails, online via the web. While they have their own website, many dealers such as VLS Legacy Corp. and Walther’s Scale Accessories also carry the complete line. I am particularly fond of their extensive line of “wood frame windows”. While the vast majority of their products are designed for the 1:24th (dollhouse), 1:48th (“O”-Scale trains) and 1:64th scale (near HO scale trains), they fit attractively in most all of my 1:35th scale dioramas. After all, windows can be of any size, right? Where a table or chair that is one foot too tall would be certainly noticeable, who is to say a 3’x 4’ window is more or less acceptable than a 3’ x 5’ window on any given house, given the varieties of style?

The Grandt Line products are made in a nice grade of injection molded styrene – it cuts, paints, and glues together well. They also make a broad selection of railings, doors, numbering kits (for street building addresses) and handily enough, a cool set of wagon wheels. These kits are usually sold in packets of 2 to 4 pieces, and run about $3-5 per packet. They also make a popular line of wing nuts, bolts, and rivets that are a “must-have” for model tank builders.

Because I will be using several each of many types of windows in this project, I have decided to measure off the various sizes of each window element. This will allow me to more quickly size the cuts about to be made in the Matt board backdrop. A simple caliper such as the one show here does the trick nicely, and is extremely useful for measuring interior dimensions, such as the width of a doorframe. Calipers like this (analog) run less than $7.00, while more accurate “digital calipers” can be found in the $30 - $50 range. Digital units provide accuracy to 1:1000th of an inch… far more than required in our project.