I realised it had been a long time since I last did an update when Daniel asked me if I was planning to post about our recent weekend at Missenden Abbey. I decided that before doing that I really should do an update on the things that I have been up to between the spring Missenden Weekend and the Autumn weekend.

At the spring weekend I took a break from my usual locomotive construction topic and spent the weekend with Ian Rathbone in the painting and lining room. This is not a subject I am good at and my expectations going into the weekend were, in retrospect way too high. I thought I would come out of the weekend being a master painter - not so of course. As Ian righty said it takes lots and lots of practice. So since that weekend I have done a little more painting, it can not be called perfect, but it is possibly passable. I plucked up the courage to paint a couple of the models I took with me, namely the Nucast GWR Steam Railmotor and the Mallard Duke.

The rail motor still has a few issues, some of my masking was not accurate enough so I need to touch up the chocolate in places. But it has a base coat now, it needs window detailing, glazing, interior and of course the roof needs fixing. The roof is not joined exactly straight, so it sits up too high in the middle, I will adjust the joint to bring it level and then make it sit correctly. After that a quick spray with white primer and some black on the pane above the motor bogie should see it look a bit better. It is now fitted with DCC sound and manages to haul itself along reasonably well. It is never going to be a perfect model, the engineering of th white metal bogie is too crude for that. Plus it is a bit of a lump with the white metal body and roof.

The Mallard Duke is a slightly better paint job, but there is some touch up needed on the splasher tops and the spring details. Once that is done I will matt the finish down a little and add the plates - when I can find where I have put them! This too will get DCC sound shortly and I am thinking it needs some brake gear - there was none in the kit, but I should not let that stop me. The backhead looks a little strange in the picture as it is laid in and not exactly straight. It will be fixed once I have painted the floorboards in the cab. I also managed to break off the brake standard on the tender - careless - so I need to reinstate that. I also need to add the buffer heads and front coupling hook. The current high gloss finish does show off the ripples in the tender flare where I did not do a perfect job, but hopefully the will be less obvious after some matt varnish to dull it down. The high gloss finish did allow the transfers to bed down nicely however - much better than my previous attempts.

I even had another go with the bow pen. Using a Mallard 57ft rail motor body I tried my hand at panel lining. Not my most successful experiment, this will eventually be stripped off for another go at some point. I think I will do more painting however before I try to move on to lining.

I have also started to paint my Black Hawthorn, but I will post that later when it is more advanced than it is now, and back in one piece.

At least I have filled some of the gaps between spring and autumn, there are other things that I will post over the next few days before the update on the Missenden Autumn weekend.