Customer Reviews

Cut and Assemble a Western Frontier Town (Dover Children's Activity Books)

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

not a bad deal for the price. you basically get a commercial district of a late 1800's "wild west" town. perfect for an HO scale train set. The problem is that i think if you just try to cut and fold the models right from the book you might be disappointed.

I made color copys of the buildings and the glue-sticked them to poster board. that way i can get more than one use out of the book and experiment a little bit. Rather than use the tabs/folds given in the book, i just cut out the buliding pieces themselves. some of the folds they want you to acomplish are crazy, and you'll have better results if you just carefully cut out the parts and assemble them like a "glitterhouse".

Glitterhouses are little cardboard buildings people used to make as christmas train decorations. it's a cool little craft that is explained very well at a free website... [...]. If you use their techniques your little cowboy buildings will come out looking better than the finished examples they show you in the book! no fooling.

So on the plus side, you get a whole town of historically acurate buildings with descriptions. Everything you need to get into this activity is available at just about any grocery store (glue pens and stix, craft knife, scissors, poster board, rulers etc) and will pretty much all fit into a shoe box. It's a nice little diversion that isn't crazy expensive to get into.

On the down side, card-modeling ain't easy. Probably not for younger kids. If you try to just work right out of the book, you'll only get one shot to get a building right. Try making copys and assemble them like glitterhouses instead. Also, the book does not include bases for the buildings, so you're on your own there (not a big deal really). And finally, the book could have included a sheet of HO scale cowboys, horses, townfolk, cactuses etc, but it doesn't (that omission cost the book one star in my rating).

I will definitely buy some of Mr. Gillon's other HO scale card model books. They seem very well researched and are a good value. The book i have was published in 1979, so it may be hard to get all of the titles.

I purchased this frontier town to go with a model railroad; it's exactly what I was looking for to go along with the old-time N & HO trains.