Entry posted by sleeper
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I had a choice of three BR blue liveries all blue of course but they vary in the yellow panels. One type is with a small yellow end panel only, one has full yellow ends wrapping right round to include the cab door, but with black round the windscreens and thirdly the one I chose full yellow ends wrapping round but with a blue panel beneath the side windows and yellow round the front windows too.
I was a little concerned that if the doors were yellow and had to be rubbed down it would be near impossible as the doors were recessed slightly.
It wasn't till I got into the masking off that I realised I'd picked the most difficult to mask, there is a little curve in the top of the blue side panel which involved cutting the masking tape round a piece of 3mm plastic tube with the craft knife, all good fun!
This first photo is a really cruel close up of the paint job, it looks better 'in the flesh' probably only because you can choose to ignore the bad bits, whereas in the photo they smack you in the eye.
I've started detailing it, you can just see some of the grab rails (4) fitted to the front. I'm also working on the headcode boxes. I'm not happy with these. I had made them shallow thinking that I could add a deeper front, which I did, but having done so I now realise the boxes should have been deeper from the very start. This has shown up now at this late stage, with the Shawplan 4mm round etched horn grilles I'm going to fit, being a knats too large for the depth of the face of the box. I'll have to solder them to a piece of brass wire and mount them in the mini drill to take them down slightly. A real pain but less work than altering the headcode boxes.
in this picture are some masks, masking tape cut on the silhouette cutter, this will be stuck to the face of the headcode box to form a guide for painting the domino spots on the face of the box. Will it work? Yes it will, I know because I've already done it once. Unfortunately the dots looked too close together, so the one on the right in the photo is the mk2 version.
I drew the box's face in Inkscape, using a head-on photo as a guide to getting the right layout. I first tried cutting them from a sticky labels sheet but it didn't seem to want to work, the cutter just tore up the label. Next I cut the design on a sheet of copy paper attached to the cutting mat. I carefully noted just where the mat lay in relation to the rollers on the cutter, released the mat and stuck masking tape exactly over the images that were cut into the paper. You can see the black outlines where I highlighted the outer edges with a pen.
I then very carefully lined up the rollers with the sheet again and re-cut the images. My luck was in, the cutter cut right bang on target, in fact there was only half a mil of tape left on each side. These were carefully teased off the mat with a scalpel and applied to the face of the headcode box. I painted the dominos with white acrylic paint and the places where the horn grilles would go in grey so if they showed through the grill it wouldn't show up.
What a pity the dots were wrongly spaced because I now have to go all through the procedure again. I wonder if I will have the same luck again?
We'll see!
cheers for now
Roly
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