D6309 is pretty much finished now and is ready to earn its keep on South Yard and St Ruth. It even went on holiday (with South Yard) to its native Cornwall a couple of weeks ago.
The trip through the paint shop was fairly long and painful, the lowest point being when I sprayed it with Humbrol matt varnish to protect the transfers only to find that this left a horrid translucent effect over the whole loco. I rescued this with an wash of thinned Precison green applied by brush. Thankfully this worked, otherwise it would have been time for the paint stripper.
The lining was done with the Bob Moore pen. This went very smoothly and only needed a bit of tidying up to make the ends nice and crisp.
The transfers are old Woodhead ones that I have had for many years. These were resurrected using Microscale liquid decal film thanks to a tip on RMWeb.
Weathering was all done by brush - I am not yet confident enough to do this with the airbrush (certainly not on something that has taken so long to reach this stage). The effect I was looking for was to reproduce the very run down condition of these locos (especially the remaining green ones) circa 1969. I think I achieved what I wanted to do (they were really grotty), but after doing it I wasn't quite so sure that I wanted it any more.
The glazing is 10 thou clear sheet glued behind the body sides using Formula 560 Canopy glue. I would have liked to do true flush glazing for the windscreens. I tried to do it but found that I couldn't persuade 10 thou glazing to stay put in a hole in a 10 thou metal loco body.
The headcodes are done using some letters that I had specially produced for me by a local printing company a long time ago. They were photographed from my hand drawn artwork onto some sort of special printing film (not normal photographic film - I tried that unsuccessfully) so that when fixed into place the headcodes appear to be behind glass. I suspect that this way of doing things has probably been superseded by computerised printing so it may not be possible to do this again.
There are still a few bits and bobs remaining - the cab door handrails are the main exterior items. I'm also going to try to fit a bit of cab detail if this can be done without it looking silly. There are still a few places on where too much daylight is visible through the side windows and louvres so I need to add a few more bits of black plastikard to block this.
I'd also like to make the wheel flanges less shiny if this can be done without compromising the running, but I'm not sure how to do this.
One day I might reinstate the lights to illuminate the headcodes from behind. I'd also really like to get a sound system working but I think that this would need to be under the baseboard both in terms of practicality and sound quality. So far I haven't found a good under baseboard system that can be set up with sounds to represent different loco types. I think it's quite a small niche market, so maybe it's too big an ask.
Overall I am very happy with the end result. The loco (to me anyway) looks the part and moves very well indeed thanks to its Atlas running gear. I might even build another one... but not just yet.
Here are a couple more photos...
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