After a bit of a break for all the usual festive preparations, I finally managed to get around to applying some of the etches to the model!

Starting with the cab fronts:

The headlight etch folded up nicely. The lens was created by very gently exposing the end of a 1.5mm fibre optic strand to a lighter flame, this causes it to "mushroom" into a wider lens shape at the end. This fits inside the assembly, which is superglued onto the door front. Photos seem to show inconsistent placement of the headlight from unit to unit, so I decided to place it ranged on the outline of the removed lamp bracket.

The "cladding" etches were applied around the corridor connector. There are two sizes, the smaller one goes around the connector itself, and the larger is glued to the cab front, to represent the "outer" cladding that the corridor connector fits into.

These needed to be carefully bent to the correct shape, and attached with superglue. There are half etches on the back side where the corners bend, this helps a bit but also makes them very fragile. Afterwards the corridor connector needed a little more cladding thickness, and this was achieved by applying model filler and filing back with wet & dry and polishing cloths to get a smooth finish.

I found that a tiny bit of nse red added to warning panel yellow paint gave the correct shade to match the Bachmann paint colour on the cabs. It needs a little rough polishing to take away the glossy finish.

End result on the cab fronts (some minor things still to be addressed).

One of the problems with using stainless steel for the etch is priming it for paint. For the windows it's not an issue, since they don't need painting, and the smaller parts aren't an issue either, but the replacement sides for the guard's compartment will be since they need to endure several applications of masking tape to apply the NSE paint job. The best primer for the job seems to be auto etch primer, which comes in an aerosol. This, along with the rest of the paint job, will be the next stage of the build.

Here are the sides applied to the Bachmann coach body, partly detailed.. kicking myself that I didn't etch holes for the handrails, the steel is hard as nails and very difficult to drill through, even though it's only .2mm thick!!

Any comments / observations appreciated as always~ :-)