New painted CNC cut buildings on amazon.jp

[cteno4]

Not seen these yet at the usual shops but ran across them a month or so ago on Amazon.jp as they started popping up when ever I looked for something. There appears to be a dozen or so. very little info on them on Amazon, bought one and then a couple of more as they are nice additions for medium sized modern buildings to add the the usual mix of Tomytec, Tomix, Kato, greenmax, and Outland.
 

Very similar in construction as the Outland buildings, but with nicer paints and exterior detailing with CNC routing (like brickwork) and a bit more realistic 5-10 story buildings. They use the CNC cut pins and holes to properly orient pieces but the are loose cut so all pieces require gluing in place (Outland actually pressure fit like Tomytec buildings pretty well, which is nice to assemble to plan on lighting or painting). The building corners, though, are done at 45° Cuts so there are no unpainted butt edges at corners the way there is with the Outland painted buildings or pegs going all the way thru walls and into external painted areas. They have all the window glass pre glued on and on some building shades over the full or part of some of the windows. like the Outland buildings they only have roof and base and a single floor in the middle, not each floor in. They do have the center of the middle floor and fhe base cut out so you could just plop down over an led to light the whole building. If you want individual floors lit you will have to add your own floors. As with Outland there are zero instructions, but with the building picture you can figure it all out in a few minutes.
 

I messed around with one and it’s pretty good to build the building and just not glue on the back wall to allow for later addition of floors and led wiring easily. Most of the more intricate structure shapes and details are on the front and the back walls are usually just a single wall. A little bit of L stock or folded hot dog wrapper on the corners to help with light leak on the back wall edges and then either glue back wall on with a removable glue (PVA or e6000) or some magnets. Floors could just be fun foam to pressure fit in well as you won’t see the interiors much in these windows.

 

only downside is the seal-a-meal the parts very tightly and it ends up warping some of the larger walls over smaller parts. A little pressure bending can correct this. I took mine out of the tight packaging and straightened them and put them stacked more loosely in a ziplock to help prevent too much warping with time and added a printout of the building picture for alter assembly help.

 

price is the only issue here, these run from ¥2500-¥7500 so bit more expensive than Outland other equivalent buildings. 

https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/B0B518B17Z/

 

look in the related products and you’ll see a number of other ones.

 

cheers

 

jeff

 

[GeorgeHInch]

I just randomly stumbled on this post while looking for something else but I'm glad to see a review of these! I've been catching them pop up more frequently as well. I've noticed them show up occasionally on AliExpress and just haven't pulled the trigger to order any.

 

I'm building out a Japanese city layout and can never manage to acquire enough buildings of this density. I was curious about the interior and it's a bit of a bummer that they don't have individual floors since I like to light and heavily detail an occasion window or two for a cool feature if you get up close. 

 

I'll have to go ahead and order a couple of them soon before they start disappearing again.

[cteno4]

Yep these and the Outland really expand the range of larger buildings. There are probably 3 or so dozen of these buildings in addition to Tomytec, Kato and greenmax buildings.
 

The amazon.jp ones lend themselves a bit better to the idea of having the back removable to slide in a stack of all the floors. This avoids the floors scraping the interior clear acetate pieces for the windows with loading a floor stack thru the bottom of the building (but this could be avoided by using one large piece of clear acetate over the whole wall interior to make the window and clear acetate is pretty inexpensive). But having the back removable gives some access once the floor stack is in place. I need to sit down and try it side by side with two similar buildings like this to see. Bummer with the nice ones is they have the window mullions and frames printed on a thick clear styrene pieces that will be hard to light seal around the edge of floors if you want to have some floors unlit. I would hazard to guess some light will also be transmitted down the thick clear styrene window sections from a lit to unlit floor. Could pop the off, scan then and then print onto clear thin acetate.

 

floor stacks can be made by just using styrene sheets for floors and a spaced block in the middle rear to be the elevator shaft. Drill a hole in the blocks and floor to make a chase way for wiring later for lights if you think you want that. You can add small support columns in the space or front corners to keep things even. I once played with gluing a layer of 1mm fun foam on a floor I put into a building that was just like 1 mm larger than the actual floor and the styrene floor base just a touch smaller than the space so that the fun foam was like a snug gasket between the floor and the walls and it was a decent light seal without any other additions. Light sealing can be the trickiest part if you want to have some floors lit and others not.

 

light sealing between floors is the big work really. But if you are willing to have all floors lit then that’s not really needed as much.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Wolf]

Never Noticed these. Curious me also ordered one to check them out now ^^

[GeorgeHInch]

I had previously ordered this high rise building. It got damaged along the bottom during shipping and they ended up refunding the whole price. Since I tend to detail the whole building, it actually might have been more a pain that the shipped it assembled instead of flat packed.

 

I'm curious which one you ordered @Wolf and how the experience goes.

 

On Aliexpress these buildings are about $28 each which seems a little steep but doable I guess. There is far more variety of styles in 1:300 compared to 1:150 though.

[James-SNMB]

Hi @GeorgeHInch, I really like that building also. I purchased mine a few years ago on eBay from "scenemodel", who appears to have stopped selling on eBay (but I think might be the original manufacturer... Not sure). I've seen them come up from time to time from other sellers, and other platforms as you noted. They're good models, sorry yours got damaged.

 

As far as detailing the inside, that's my eventual ambition as well, but yeah, it's sealed so that makes it more complicated. But the floor/core structure is independent from the exterior. When I flip it upside down, it slides around. So my plan is to carefully pry off the bottom floor from the exterior and to release the floors/core for detailing. Should be doable anyway.

 

I know they made a variety of buildings and there's a variety of ways to access the interior. Some will slide right out, and one I have I'm going to have to pry off the exterior and then glue it back on when I'm done.

 

I'm also working towards a dense city scene, and always excited to see some new options from the smaller sellers. I don't keep an eye on Amazon jp, and I hate searching on AliExpress (is it just me, or is the search function awful?) so I'm always grateful for finds like this shared on the forum!

[cteno4]

@James-SNMB I also got a number of those buildings from scalescenes and all arrived in perfect shape. The one larger high rise I go from aliexpress seller can crunched with lousy packaging and aliexpress only refunded about 20%, building is going to take a lot of work to salvage… so I have not bought any built buildings from aliexpress. All the ones I got I was able to pull the cores out pretty easily, luckily none glued in on mine.

 

yes aliexpress search does suck and requires a lot of sifting around to find a good deal. I’ve found using the set of similar items down at the bottom of the page brings up some possibilities that seem buried in their search function. Aliexpress also started just throwing random outer results from your previous searches into your current search too to further make it hard to find stuff.

 

jeff

[James-SNMB]

Thanks for that search tip @cteno4. I remember you sharing that experience on damage to that building. Definitely tempers my enthusiasm to go looking when both you and George have had bad shipping experiences. Plus I already have dozens of unfinished and un-started structure projects sitting in boxes and scattered on the layout... I guess it couldn't hurt to browse around AliExpress... Just for a minute...

 

[cteno4]

All the unbuilt buildings I’ve gotten from aliexpress have shipped fine. Mostly I’ve had very good luck with aliexpress, just a couple lost packages, mainly one that was one of their combined shipping from several sellers that only one seller’s stuff was in the combined package (rest I expect were left at the shipping center). After a lot of back and forth with aliexpress they finally refunded for all the stuff that never showed. 
 

another trick on aliexpress searches is to pull some of the terms out of the titles of search results that may be different than you put in that can bring up some other listings.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Burtos]

On 11/7/2022 at 11:55 PM, GeorgeHInch said:

I had previously ordered this high rise building. It got damaged along the bottom during shipping and they ended up refunding the whole price. Since I tend to detail the whole building, it actually might have been more a pain that the shipped it assembled instead of flat packed.

 

I'm curious which one you ordered @Wolf and how the experience goes.

 

On Aliexpress these buildings are about $28 each which seems a little steep but doable I guess. There is far more variety of styles in 1:300 compared to 1:150 though.

I have ordered this a week ago from AliExpress, so fingers crossed it comes in jus the one piece. 

 

There are some really nice buildings on Aliexpress, im just going to wait and see how the quality is on this one before being tempted to buy any more. 

Edited September 20, 2023 by Burtos

[cteno4]

@Burtos be careful with aliexpress on any pre built buildings. I ordered a few of these on ebay and they all came packed pretty well and survived fine. I then ordered one off aliexpress which was shipped with one skinny wrap bit bubble wrap and tossed into a large plastic shipping bag. Of course came through pretty mangled and I was just given like 20% refund or return item but the return process to get a shipping label was not given and aliexpress’s return process is very automated and frustrating, so I would only buy flat, unbuilt Outland type kits from aliexpress.

 

you can find the built kits like the one you referenced at 1:150 on ebay now and then as well and I’ve had a much better luck with damage issues with ebay than with aliexpress. I’ve used aliexpress a lot and had general good luck except for a few wrongly shipped items, a few like the building damaged in shipping, and a few MIA in the post. But dealing with their AI, non human customer support is very frustrating and only simple things like lost in shipping do you get easier solutions for. So my lesson is don’t by fragile or really expensive stuff on aliexpress in case there is trouble.

 

jeff

[Burtos]

Thanks for heads up.  It's been posted out today so will wait and see what state it arrives in a week or so.

[cteno4]

Best of luck! Hope it comes through fine.

 

the other mishap I have had with aliexpress has been when they end up combining shipping from different sellers at a distribution point. One was a real mess and took a few months of back and forth for missing stuff to be refunded or replaced. I had one combined shipping go completely poof and another missing a couple of sellers items. So now I tend to spread out the shipping so different sellers are not combined. 
 

for the most part though it’s been great just have to watch the poor cs contact you can get. The AI just runs you in circles.

 

jeff

[brill27mcb]

On 9/21/2023 at 6:16 PM, cteno4 said:

... The AI just runs you in circles.

 

It learned how to do that from humans.

 

Rich K.

[cteno4]

AI has unfortunately gotten better at being no use than humans…

 

jeff

[Burtos]

On 9/21/2023 at 11:16 PM, cteno4 said:

Best of luck! Hope it comes through fine.

 

the other mishap I have had with aliexpress has been when they end up combining shipping from different sellers at a distribution point. One was a real mess and took a few months of back and forth for missing stuff to be refunded or replaced. I had one combined shipping go completely poof and another missing a couple of sellers items. So now I tend to spread out the shipping so different sellers are not combined. 
 

for the most part though it’s been great just have to watch the poor cs contact you can get. The AI just runs you in circles.

 

jeff

Item Arrived today, opened the package and no damage, item was well wrapped in 3 layers of good thickness of bubble wraps.