DayReturn

You can probably say that this is the exception that proves the rule, but I think you will find that the Tri-ang/Rovex/Trackmaster R11 box van, in a wide choice of colours, is a surprisingly faithful representation of a LYR Diagram 20 Meat Van. Dimensionally it matches the David Geen equivalent very closely indeed. And there must be thoooousands of them, mostly in landfill sites.

It looks wonderfully dismal! You missed out the grey circles of chewing gum though, and the unmentionable…

Hmm … I could say a few things about Merton and Croydon and Sutton boroughs, but here is not the place! As with St Helier Estate, so outside my door. Once upon a time we had proper interwoven paving on our pavements. In the eighties that got stylised and replaced with 30cm square (I think) easy-maintenance blocks, which easily migrated and easily broke and after not long, looked shambolic and hazardous. So about 10 years ago they just tarmacked the pavement. Across the road, a new private development included proper paving and planters; a stark contrast to the budget-side of the street. Meanwhile at the same time the posh streets of Wimbledon Village got real boulevard style paving. I calculated that my street pays 3times more council tax per metre of street than the fancy avenues by the Common! Off topic except that you may want to assess the council tax bands of your model street before settling on its features and furnishings!

Tbh I used the same depth of cut for the embossing as for the edge cuts on this one. Maximum reliable cut depth won’t go through 20 thou styrene so you have to finish the edge cuts by bend and snap, or with a knife, or a judicious combination of both. But IIRC you have 20 depth settings (I’ve used the lightest ones to cut big wagon letter shapes on waterslide transfer paper), and you can specify different settings for each colour of your original CAD drawing, to get shallow and deep cuts on one job. I’ve also made a scriber tool to use alongside the cutting tool. The collet for that will also take a pen etc. There are two tool holders on the machine. Lots of versatility for sheet work. I first bought it for carriage side mouldings and wagon sides, but once you know it’s there, you can think of loads of trivial and ambitious uses for it. It can also use registration keys to cut print work and double sided, but I haven’t advanced that far yet.

Same idea but in the vertical plane. Every brick, quoin, lintel as per the original. (Italian decorative white bricks, English bond.

Invest in a Sihouette or Cricut cutter. Use the free download application to design your paving in as much detail as you want, including cracked and broken slabs, kerbstones, gulleys, tree grills, litter, etc., using the precise dimensions of where you are going to lay it, change your mind and alter it, cut a trial on plain card, try it out in place, (the card might be all you need, otherwise … ), cut onto 20 thou styrene, try it out in situ to double check, take it out (all one piece), paint and decorate it, and fix it down again permanently. I put something up a while ago for a simple van body that uses the same technique, but there’s a whole section on vinyl cutters here somewhere.

Found the label of the mystery stripper. It’s composed of 2-Propanol; Dimethyl carbinol CAS #67-63-0; 2-Butoxyethanol CAS #111-76-2.

This example did not respond to Dettol, but responded rapidly to a solution specifically intended for stripping plastic models. I can’t remember what the solution is called but it was on the model railway market maybe 30 years ago in the bottle in the picture, and I haven’t seen it around since. I’ve got the label somewhere so if it turns up, I’ll add it. The backstory here is that I bought the carriage second hand. It had been sprayed gloss lake (probably cellulose) and with a grey undercoat (probably etch primer). and the panelling lining had been attempted fairly coarsely in gold paint, probably Humbrol. I oversprayed it and tried over and over to re-line it but the combined effect of the thick-setting Humbrol gold metallic, and the unevenness of the previous attempt at lining made it impossible for me to get decent lines from my pen. The paint would flow off the pen line, helped by the fact that the honed pen broke the surface of the previous paint. That also spoiled the flow of the pen tip itself. So I gave up and tried to start stripping it using dettol. That didn’t touch the red cellulose, but I would have had to scratch away to clear the original gold paint. So I took out this aged bottle and got results in minutes. All good, but of course I now have a tedious job to remove every fleck of wrinkled old paint. I would have got the same result with cellulose thinners, but that would have damaged the internal plastic work.

I don’t know! I bought mine second hand and bought an extra, new auto blade, plus a sheaf of manually adjusting blades and a holder. At first I thought I needed the new blade, but once I got used to settings that worked, I went back to the old blade and I’m still using it, on card and styrene and also on outlines of large letters on white transfer film. That’s several dozen sheets of styrene plus numerous draft first cuts and mock-ups in cheapish card. I also turned a collet and a scribing pin to use to scribe faint laying-outs on sheet metal. You can set depth, speed, force and number of cuts, so lots of parameters, but it pays to be cautious, not ambitious or hasty.

Bold assumptions! Lots of Slaters floors are a touch too wide, and lots of otherwise masterful kits have a token rectangle of stripey embossed styrene in lieu of a floor. It’s going off topic, but one tool I’m continually finding new uses for and the ability to refine models with, is my vinyl cutter. I have a Silhouette Cameo, and Cricut ones are essentially the same. One of the simplest outputs from it is wagon floors with precise rectangular corners and dimensions, with correctly scored representations of the floor planking (whose joins would only be discernible from the fillet of dirt lodging there), and entirely repeatable at the press of a button. (And for the Woodham kit in my photos, the cutouts to step around the cast internal ironwork.). You can’t go thicker than 20 thou styrene without completing the cut by hand, but you can laminate two guaranteed identical floor pieces together if 20 thou is too thin. And there are hundreds of other things you can do with the machine that involve sheet work accurate to +/- 0.1mm. But that’s another topic.

The picture you show, Rob, illustrates another point to keep in mind. The kit shown in the Railway Hobby Shop tool, sits flat on the jig, upside down, whereas lots of rolling stock won’t have flat edges in any plane. The LBSCR wagon in my example has rounded ends (to support a wagon sheet and hopefully allow rain to run off - wonderfully optimistic, those Victorians). Likewise van ends. Straight ended open wagons often had side and especially end door hinges, and in later years had a protective metal strip stapled to the upper edge. And while the side rail, solebar and headstock might have had little to disrupt a smooth bottom edge, kit makers often include additional elements into the single casting, if not the whole axleguard assemblage. In my example the opposite applies, the solebars are entirely separate so the bottom rail is 12 inches above the flat datum. Likewise the surface detail interferes with squareness of the side plane and end plane, so geometrically solid faces on the jig, are not as helpful as one might suppose, compared with something tailored.

Yes of course you are right, The Johnster. And we should aim for the highest precision of which we are capable. Meanwhile Ive found a pair of jigs, these fit a Woodham Wagon Works LBSCR 4 plank open, among others, and I’ve set it up for the very same. The sides are pinned to the jig with pairs of magnets, and it stands on a sheet of glass, though only the end castings actually sit on the glass and they are not perfectly flat. I’ve deliberately put the loose end at an angle to stress its only role is to level the side. In shot as well are the corresponding inside jig and an engineer’s square, plus the kind of file that is very useful for getting flat, straight surfaces on kits, such as the edge of the solebar of the other side, posed accordingly.

Closer to a right-angle than many real wooden wagons and none-too-few steel ones then? ;-). (Or the walls of my Victorian house :-( ) Yes you are right of course, but the material is easy to work. A good quality medium sized flat fine file is also a very useful tool, and can straighten out that sort of deviation. I cut slots out to allow for e.g. moulded bolt heads and washer plates, and corner plates, and finish up with jigs that are specifically for a particular kit, but the angle extrusion is within the tolerances of most cast and moulded wagon kits. As a flat straightedge, it is invaluable. I couldn’t find my box of wagon jigs, but the pic shows it as a straightedge reference fence on my lining setup.

Another all-purpose item to have handy is a length of extruded aluminium angle from Wickes or similar, typically the 2cm by 2cm one, though the other ones might be handy sometimes. That gives you an internal and external right angle, it’s easy to cut to whatever length and shape you want, so it’s handy for making any number of jigs. It also comes in useful as a rightangle fence on your workbench which you can screw down and I’m about to use some on my coach lining jig to make a horizontal reference fence.

Good. Be inspired, not dismayed! Also Geoff Haynes’ book and Martin Welch’s too. Practice, practice and practice. Have half a dozen similar models in progress concurrently, so when you complete a stage on one, you can move on to the next, after a stretch and tea break. Get an Optivisor cheap copy for £20, to see more closely what’s going on. The most frustrating aspect of the process is when you go back to the first model in the batch and see how poor it is compared with your most recent one. You won’t be content until you strip it down and do it again. (Most of my current scruffy work arises from trying to over-paint and especially, re-line, on top of previous attempts.)