S&D coaches - paint and lining.
After the full brake I showed in the last entry, I cracked on with a second vehicle from the same range of kits, while the build sequence was fresh in my mind. I think it's a composite!
I haven't progressed this second one completely as I'm still puzzling over the roof details, and might want to revisit the first one in the light of better understanding. The kits come with
four different types of castings representing the set-up for day and night running, but the instructions are frustratingly terse, just telling you that the drawing on the front of the kit is
running in day-mode, and leaving the modeller to figure out which castings are which and how night-running would work! A little drawing would have cost nothing and saved hours
of doubt, but hey-ho, such is the way of the great British model railway kit and I suppose it's what we call character-building.
Now if I was being clever I'd crack on build the other two, but I felt that I needed a bit of motivation before soldiering on, and anyway I'd run out of wheels for the time being. I'd had the airbrush out in the conservatory for the first time this year, so it seemed like a good ideal to paint and line these two to give me a bit of confidence moving forward - keeping in mind there are also four bogie vehicles to be done at some point.
I don't have any etching primer at the moment, so the models were treated to Halford's white primer, but being careful to let it bake on for at least 24 hours before applying a colour coat. I don't want to put words into someone's mouth but I recall reading one of the professional painters saying that they got on fine with the Halfords stuff, but it was important to let it dry thoroughly. Once I was happy with the primed coaches, I mixed up some thinned Railmatch S&D prussian blue and applied several very dilute coats over about 24 hours. I was very happy with the way this went on and after five or six coats I felt I was getting the right depth of colour.
The models were then left well alone with another 24 hours and then the lining commenced:
I used neat Humbrol enamel gloss yellow from a fresh tinlet (it just so happened that I needed a new tin anyway, but all the books seem to recommend using a fresh tin and it seems sound advice considering the relative costs of paint and kit). I must admit, despite some attempts, I haven't really got to grips with my Bob Moore lining pen, so for these I went back to the bow-pen which has served well enough in the past. I did however, have a bit of breakthrough in terms of technique. In the past I've always loaded up the pen with a decent blob of paint, but then I've found that the flow quickly becomes erratic and the pen needs to be repeatedly opened and cleaned. In Geoff Hayes' book on painting, which I picked up a few weeks ago, he says that you only need to apply a single drop of paint from the end of a cocktail stick, and that even two such drops is too much. Hmm, interesting - and completely counter to what I've been doing, which probably equals about 20 such droplets. I was a tiny bit skeptical about this but I have to say it works splendidly, and was able to line most of the horizontal bits of these coaches with just a single application - maybe three or four in total for the vertical bits, corners and so on. Better still, because there's such a small amount of paint, most of it gets used and there's very little build-up of dried gunk between the jaws of the pen. Rather than cleaning it properly between each drop, using thinners, I just wiped it clean on tissue and applied another drop. For these coaches, too, I also tried to slow down my drawing of the line, giving the paint time to flow out and not stutter. Although the drawing is slower, the process as a whole goes so much more smoothly that the job is much less time-consuming. taking about 30 minutes per side.
I'd purposely not lined the ventilators as I wasn't decided how to tackle them. Over on Wright's Writes, Ian Rathone helpfully suggested leaving them off on future builds, only adding them after the lining is done - which helps get everything square, too. For these, though, I returned to them tonight and added the lining onto the ventilator itself, which is probably a no-no but looks fine in context and much better than leaving them unlined.
Based on my 7mm S&D stock (see earlier), the droplights should be a reddish-brown colour which I think will add a little something. Then it's on to transfers and door handles etc. Fun!
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