It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 6 Final: Adding Details

This is the final installment for both the Kellogg's Fire House from Engine House project as well as our look at small fire engines. I'll have a couple more posts concerning small vehicles in general and that will wrap up the series on small vehicles in general. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

This final post shows some of the extra details I added to the roof as well as the placement of the HVAC unit in a different spot on the roof.

Arrrgh, after assembling the walls, one of the corners split 😤

The two types of brick walls is actually a common feature on buildings in urban areas. Nice, cleanly dressed walls face the public side, scruffy looking walls face the alleys or buildings situated right next to the station. The rougher textured bricks would have been cheaper and thus would have been a cost-cutting factor in the construction.

Scrap railing and ladder material and a horn from an O-gauge diesel engine provide detail on top of the hose drying tower roof

A hatch, a vent and the HVAC complete the detailing

I didn't want a five-bay fire house. The arrangement of the vehicles within a four-bay house as well as allowing room for the alarm center and a small office means I ended up with a 7 3/16" square building.

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 5 The Build: The Roof

The roof is next and is made from the roof scan of the original Kellogg's engine house and cut down to size. The bracing is inset from the edges of the roof enough to allow the frame work to rest just inside of the wall bracing. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 4 The Build: Bracing the Walls

After building the mock-up it was time to head on to the final build. One of the steps I forgot to photograph was assembling the walls, but really it was simple. Each wall has a tab on which glue is applied and used to attach it to the next wall. Take care to keep the walls square and straight and then wait for the glue to dry before applying the bracing.

All of my paper buildings get bracing made from either balsa wood or basswood - whichever I have at the time. My buildings tend to get moved around a lot so the bracing adds much needed strength. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

There's so much void space in the front wall with the doors open, that each door opening needs to be framed, otherwise the whole front wall would bend in.

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 3 The Mock-Up

Remember folks, this is a re-posting of a project which first appeared here on the blog back in 2015. Here's something I normally don't do on those very rare occasions when I actually do build something: making a mock-up. Don't know why I thought this was necessary but I did it anyway. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

The originals

-After scanning the original artwork, I cropped the various elements and saved them as separate .jpeg files. I ended up with separate .jpeg's for each wall, the bay door, the various human entry way doors, a window (all the windows were the same so I created one .jpeg for a whole window, and one .jpeg for a trimmed-down smaller window)

-Then I inserted the .jpeg's into a Word doc which allowed me to adjust the size of things like the doors

-The bay door of the engine house was too large to use as is. It was saved as a separate .jpeg file inserted into the Word doc and reduced in size.

-I printed low-res B&W copies. 

-Here you can see a wall which I had cut out in order to get a comparison between  the fire engine and wall

-The small doors laying loosely on top are copies of the engine house bay door reduced in size

-All four walls and the roof glued together

-You'll notice the bay doors each have a window on them. I cropped out one of the wall windows, then overlaid it over the door

-An HVAC unit and a tower representing the hose drying tower was placed atop the roof

The complete mock-up. The small sign above the double doors reads "Engine Co. No. 7"

I designed three different side walls. Two have varying window arrangements and one is solid brick, with graphics used from a sheet of brick paper that was laying around The Cave. The different brick pattern is not unlike real fire house constructs where-in one type of brick is used on walls facing the street, while cheaper, less attractive brick is used for walls which either butt up against a neighboring building or face into an alley.

-By overlaying window and door graphics on the plain brick wall you end up with a more detailed structure.

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 2 Kellogg's N Scale Engine House

This project was inspired by the insert I bought off of fleaBay many years ago. I believe it may have come with the trucks when you ordered them from Kellogg's. The insert shows a fire station you could have made from a shoebox! It's nice '50s era crafting idea but impractical for my purpose. If I were to use a shoebox it would have needed to be a small one to accommodate those small engines and hey, everyone in this house outgrew small shoes a long time ago! But, as luck would have it, I came across another Kellogg's offering on fleaBay that was perfect for this project: an N-scale brick engine house kit! By scanning the two sheets of the kit on my large format scanner and printing them out on 11"x14" 90lb cardstock, I was able to make my own fire station kit! The next installment will cover the mock-up of the station. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Front and back of the insert

Kellogg's N-scale Engine House

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Fire House From Engine House Project - Pt 1 Fire House Memories

I think it best to give you a bit of background info before getting into the nuts-&-bolts of this project. My fascination with fire and emergency vehicles, fire stations, and all that stuff goes back to my childhood. Approx. 200' or so from our house, on the next street over, stood Engine Company 28. The station was built in 1904 (as the capstone above the door indicates and helps in dating the neighborhood I grew up in) and was activated in 1905. The station was located in the Merrill Park district of Milwaukee and I would go in there and visit fairly often. Here's a tidbit of nostalgia: back in the day - 1950s & '60s, one had to go to the local fire station to get their bicycles inspected and to get a license. The licenses were purely voluntary, but it was kind of a public relations thing for the kids to see their local fire fighters.

My uncle Eddie worked at Engine Co. 28 and my parents always said, "He drove the chief." Okay, soooo as an adult trying to put 2-&-2 together he was most likely the assistant fire chief for that station. I had seen him 'in action' at fires in the neighborhood and he was definitely not handling hoses, axes, or other equipment. I saw him walking around and directing other firemen to hot spots needing attention. One fire in particular was a tire warehouse which was ablaze just a couple of blocks away in the Menomonee River Valley - what a stinky fire that was!! And there he was traversing the perimeter and directing the fire firemen.

That being said, I seldom actually saw him in the fire house and I never interrupted his work or ask to see him. One of the other memories I had was that of an old pumper truck (likely '40s or early '50s era) with open cab and split windshield. What a beauty! It was always parked towards the left rear of the station as one entered through the bay door. The photos below are Google street view images from a few years back.

Apparently Engine Co. 28 was in continuous service from 1905 to 2017 when it was deactivated. Now that alone defies all logic as that whole neighborhood was a fire waiting to happen, and growing up in it I saw plenty of them! In any case, somebody with more sense and foresight decided to reactivate it and the station reopened just last year. The full story, along with a history of the fire house, can be found on the OnMilwaukee blog by Bobby Tanzilo. BTW, the capstone with "1904" above the bay door can best be seen in the blog article by Mr. Tanzilo - it doesn't show up well on the Google street view images. Stay tuned for our next installment: Inspiration and planning the fire house. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

It's A Small World After All: Kellogg's Corn Flakes 1956-57 Fire Engine Set - Kellogg's Fire Dept. (K.F.D.) - Ladder Truck, Short

This is the last of Kellogg's K.F.D. fire trucks, the short ladder truck. Tomorrow we'll look at making a fire station to fit all of these in! Enjoy! Opa Fritz