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Demountable Things


D869

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A couple of items that have been stuck in the paint shop for a while.

 

First up is a BD container. This is from a Parkwood kit that was sat in the gloat box for ages. It's sat in a steel bodied high - also from a Parkwood kit. The chassis is a 2mm Association etch.

 

I've hankered after a container in the later BR 'door to door' livery for a long time and have now finally got round to doing one. It may be possible to get commercial container transfers but I was doing some custom decals for other reasons anyway so I added some 'A' and 'BD' container branding to the sheet. I'm very pleased with the results even though getting the transfers to sit around the strapping was a swine of a job.

 

The transfers on the wagon are resurrected Woodheads - this time with just a single coat of liquid decal film. This seems to leave less of an adhesive 'halo' than my original approach of using two coats. Once sprayed with Dullcote the result stands up to pretty close scrutiny.

 

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For the photos I decided that it was time that I started putting my fancy pants new DSLR to good use and do things properly with lights, backdrop and all. It's more than capable of exposing the shortcomings of my modelling and my limited ability with the paint brush. Getting rid of dust is also becoming an issue. I attacked this model several times with a paint brush but it just seems to shift the dust around. Compressed air might work better but I wasn't in the mood for dragging the compressor out.

 

The second new addition is another demountable bromine tank. This is one of those actually owned by Associated Octel (as opposed to their customer, F.W.Berk). These sat on conflats rather than lowfits and had a different livery. I'm grateful to Trevor Mann for sharing some colour photos with me. Without these I'd have had to rely on black and white photos and David Larkin's book which describes it as white with a yellow lid... which is a little wide of the mark.

 

The new tank (the one on the right) is seen here along with its F.W.Berk friends. I did take a close up of this vehicle on its own but it really does show up the shortcomings in paintwork and so on, so it's not going to appear on here.

 

blogentry-9623-0-09974700-1446763779_thumb.jpg

 

The tank is a 3d print and sits on a 2mm Association etched conflat and etched chassis with added bits of styrene strip for the framework that supported the tank. The decals on both tank and wagon were custom printed by Precision Decals from my own artwork. I seriously doubt that I'd have been able to squeeze commercial transfers onto the side of the conflat.

 

I also need to thank the people who replied to my query about N Brass container chains on the 2mm VAG. This overcame the final sticking point in actually finishing this model. In the end I gave up using the extension etches provided and used twisted wire which is not a perfect representation of the real thing but does allow some tension to be achieved so that the chains don't sag.

 

In other news, it now turns out that the Berk tanks had two colour schemes during their brief time in traffic to Hayle, with grey being an option for these too. Unfortunately grey and yellow are pretty indistinguishable on black and white photos so whether or not FWB4 is the correct colour is now an open question. I can't justify a repaint... because I don't actually know whether it was grey or yellow. Such are the perils of modelling such obscure vehicles.

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  • RMweb Gold

Nice to see an update on these Andy.

 

Lovely crisp work with a great attention to detail.

 

The pictures don't really give an idea of how small everything is either.

 

Glad to see the Woodhead Transfers have been resurrected once more as well... ;)

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

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Cheers Mark. Expect to see more resurrected Woodhead transfers. I bought quite a lot of their wagon transfer sheets back in the day and many were never used because their 'pressfix' glue stopped working. Now that I know the liquid decal film trick they have a new lease of life... and I like building wagons.

 

Considering their age I think it's very impressive that they stand such close scrutiny alongside more recent offerings. In many cases they are still better than the modern stuff... and that applies to ALPS and screen printed waterslides.

 

Regards, Andy

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  • RMweb Gold

Hi Andy, lovely stuff as usual. Can you enlighten us on the method for bringing Woodhead transfers back to life. Like you I have a fair few that are no longer sticky.

Jerry 

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Hi Andy, lovely stuff as usual. Can you enlighten us on the method for bringing Woodhead transfers back to life. Like you I have a fair few that are no longer sticky.

Jerry 

 

No probs Jerry. The tip came from RMWeb but rather than try to track it down again, here's what I do...

 

The stuff you need is Microscale Liquid Decal Film.

 

Tape the decal sheet along all four sides to a piece of board that won't mind getting a bit wet.

 

Then brush a coat of Decal Film liberally across the whole thing using a decent sized soft bristled brush.

 

Leave it to dry out before removing from the board and then use it exactly like a waterslide transfer (except the other way up I think). I usually try to take just the top layer of backing paper when cutting from the sheet rather than cutting all of the way through.

 

The original advice was to use two coats. I've done that but found it leaves quite a visible residue around the transfer so I tried with just a single coat this time. It worked fine for me.

 

Regards, Andy

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