It's been a fair while since I last did a Standard Arthur, makes a change from the usual Bulleids etc.

I'd had the donor for sometime, plus I'd also acquired Irwells: The Book of Standard Class 5... While reading the book and comparing it to Bachmann's model of the Standard 5, I noticed there was a few things missing to make it a true Standard Arthur - namely lamp brackets and few minor improvements to make.

After discovering that the smoke box door popped out easily (only lightly glued in fortunately). I removed virtually all the detail from the door, including the part moulded smoke-box dart, the top lamp bracket (way to chunky), the hand rail (which was damaged) and the moulded on shed plate. After a fair amount of fiddling and fettling (not to mention crawling round on the floor once they'd gone ping!!) I had fabricated new lamp brackets for the door (and two for the tender) and then fitted all the new bits to the door, along with the etched number and shed-code plates and ended up with it looking like this:

Next up I turned my attention to the rest of the loco, first up I added the additional lamp brackets to the tender and fabricated a fire Iron tunnel for the bunker - as Bachmann have the hole in the tender for it, but have not modeled it. Then I had the fun task of removing the front NEM pocket which is an absolute pain in the backside to do as it requires a near full strip down of the chassis to remove it!!! After this, removing the cabside numbers was simple!!! 73117 Vivien seen here with name plates attached and cab-sides varnished with gloss for numbering.

Numbers and water treatment symbols were added, before the whole thing was made ready for the paint shop.

Next was a trip to the paint shop, I always start at the bottom of the loco and work my way up so on go the lighter weathering colours first and then the darker. I also run the loco in-between coats to ensure the wheels aren't patchy. Once back from the paint shop I remove the masking from the cab and the front end before getting on with the hand weathering.

Once the hand weathering is done, I return the loco to to the paint shop to seal all the weathering in place with a few coats of Matt varnish. After it's dried I added the oil and grease deposits and the final detailing is done:

That's another loco done, next up is the final Air Smoothed West Country...

Till next time TBG