I have 8 or so Walthers Cornerstone kits that I haven't assembled yet. Does anyone have an opinion about the kits? Easy to assemble? Hmm... fine time to ask, huh...?
I have found most to be easy to moderate. Mostly making sure the parts fit together nicely after removal from sprue.
Yes, easy to assemble, though in my experience, the thickness of the plastic used is thinner than the DPM offerings. If you will be lighting your buildings, you would need a couple of coats of black paint in the inside surfaces to avoid the jack-o-lantern effect of light bleed vs. a single coat for DPM models. Walthers kits offer a wider variety of building prototypes than DPM.
The one's I've assembled are very well done with crisp details and easy to put together. They have tight seams that don't require much if any sanding to get the them together without gaps. This is their santa fe depot which was a very easy build. Lots of parts for the corners but an excellent fit out of the box and some thin liquid cement made it a snap to get everything together. This is their merchants row. A bit more effort to paint how I wanted since the entire front is a single piece except for the recessed doorways. I did this "Clarksville depot" a couple decades ago. The water tower in the background is also another excellent walthers kit. Their "Glacier Gravel Co." kit I think overall they are some of the best kits out there.
It was once recommended to me that instead of using just black paint that one should first paint the interior portions of the walls silver (silver not gray) then a coat of flat black. Reason given was that the silver paint contained more pigment and thus would block more light than just straight black. The flat black overcoat was to prevent reflection. I never had lights in any buildings so I cannot attest to the veracity of this claim.
Always good fit on the many Walthers kits i've made. My only beefs are: 1/ Older kits have overscale brickwork 2/ Smaller building kits are comparatively expensive compared to their larger offerings. Their Union Station kit is a fave, just did one for a friend (see attached)
I think I have virtually every n scale Cornerstone kit other than the steel mill.........None of them have been particularly hard, although a few, like the coaling tower and cinder conveyor, have some cable/rope lines that can be a challenge. I don't do interiors in my buildings, so my go to for lighted buildings is to build a fitted black paper insert.......I do cutouts where I want lighted windows and leave others covered . It's an extra step to build the inserts, but I like the look of randomly lit windows vs the whole building being lit.
I have many Walthers kits which I have assembled. The fit on some of them is challenging (ADM elevator, Medusa Cement) due to the curved surfaces. Use of putty and sanding the surface is recommended. There are some who have mentioned some issues with the instructions as well. The exploded diagrams are occasionally cryptic and may confuse the order of assembly.
They're pretty good. They're the only line of N scale product that Walthers has ever released that wasn't embarrassingly awful.