57xx
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Blog Comments posted by 57xx
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Excellent job as usual Nick!
If you are might be building more brass kits, it might be worth considering an RSU for the soldering. I think it would make short work of the overlays and fittings without having to worry about any distortion as with the gas torch.
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25 minutes ago, wappinghigh said:
Right... so I quote direct from this.. only 7219–39 has straight footplates! So where are all the Hornby versions of all.. or any?.. of the others?! DId they not do them because of the issues the original poster illustrated on the modelling of the later modified 5205's???
Have you actually tried looking on a site like Hattons? Russ has already posted a pic of one for you.
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To their credit, Hornby have now provided the latest 52xx models with a separate detailed smoke box dart. However we still await the sprung buffers.
There were also some other changes, including putting on the rear guard irons. I remember when I picked up my 4257, having a look over it to see what the Brassmasters detailing kit improved upon and noticing this and then pondering if it was still worth getting the detailing kit. I don't need the bunker fender for 1930's condition and not too fussed on the brake rigging, not something I'll see under normal running.
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I keep coming back, looking at the full size pic of the Wm Hunt wagon and being astounded that it is hand painted. Your father had an exceptional talent there.
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When building these wooden wagons, and in the absence of detailed drawings, it really helps to understand how the prototype was made
It's most definitely something that is advantageous when modelling wagons in general. The amount of 7 plank open wagons I've seen where the builder decided to represent a replacement unpainted plank on one of the top two planks, and only painted 1/3rd of it shows people not thinking about construction.
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Sitting waiting for my bike to be MOTd and this pops up. Perfect timing for some reading.
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9 hours ago, magmouse said:
The angle block is from Axminster Tools, what they call a "Ground Angle Plate - 50mm": https://www.axminstertools.com/axminster-ground-angle-plate-50mm-800300?queryID=3730d40a3b5b0c5ff7d9a6eff2bedea3
It isn't cheap, but very useful, being accurately ground to have right angles to all the reference faces, heavy enough to act as a weight while glue dries, and usable with small magnets as clamps.
The only downside is it is just too big to fit inside most pre-grouping wagons, so you can do the first corner, but not the second. The loco coal wagon here is unusually wide for the period, so I was able to fit the block inside it.
If you do a matching pair of 1 side +1 end glued square with the block, then when you come to glue the two resulting parts, it's hard not to get a square (rectangular for the pedants) final assembly of the sides and ends.
7 hours ago, magmouse said:Thanks for the link to the blocks - they look great. I have seen them before in the background of people's workbench photos, but I struggled to locate them because I didn't know what they are called and therefore couldn't search for them online! I think I will get a couple of the smaller ones - they look ideal for assembling wagons, etc.
The are known as 123 (or sometimes 321) blocks, as they traditionally are 1" x2" x3".
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That was a lot of work you had to put in to that kit, but well worth the final result.
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For anyone wondering what getting "levels balanced" entails, here's a couple more snaps. In my laymans terms, the Levels tool adjusts the start points for darkest and lightest colours (black/white) on you picture and gives a better tonal range.
Pic 1 shows the raw photo and the levels curve, not the dead spots between the left (black) most slider and right (white) most slider.
You can use Autolevels, but I like to do it manually. I move the outermost sliders in to where the tone curve starts at each end, then adjust the midpoint (usually to the left) to bring out the detail in the darker areas, thus:
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Here are the pics from lunch time, minimal tweaking in photoshop to get the levels balanced.
I had the tripod a bit too high for the first wagon and it's got that odd angle it again. It could have done with a longer exposure, this was only 0.8s.
I swapped wagons for another colour to test, lowered the tripod and set the exposure time to 2s. Much better.
One more lesson learned, dust off your models if they have been sat on the workbench for a while...!
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Hi Nick, it's a Sony DSC-HX60, a compact camera but with good lens and lots of features.
There is a "semi-auto focus" mode that I've not played with, that might be the equivalent of "back button focus"? With manual focusing, there is no focus ring on the camera so it is done with buttons and a bit meh.
I've had a little play during lunchtime today as it's a WFH day and used some natural light by the window.
One of the issues with focus could be a user problem... I have a remote shutter release cable originally for my old dead SLR (and also used on my Fuji Finepix, which also sadly died), but no way to use it on the Sony. So, I was holding the tripod firmly and pressing and holding the shutter release button to minimise shake. The penny dropped today that I should be using the timer with the long exposures, so wacked it on 10secs, got the auto focus latching on to the target and pressed down further and let go... blip... blip... blip... click. No shake and crisper numbers when looking at the preview on screen. Slowly getting there! More pics to process and upload after work.
cheers
Ric
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As promised, here's the result of the 2nd test with indirect lighting.
The colours are looking more natural and the underframe is visible without having to lighten the whole picture. Focusing was a royal PITA so need to work on that (the manual focus was useless so stuck with auto focus for now).
20 hours ago, magmouse said:As you say, the shadows in the under frame area are quite blocked up. You may be able to address this to some extent at the post-production stage, if you have a photo editor that will lift the shadows. That assumes the camera managed to capture some detail there in the first place, of course.
I had a tweak on the original pic and adjusted the mid levels which did bring out the underframe detail and made the oxide paint less "contrasty", but it was still too red compared with above..
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Thanks, Nick. I happened to try a couple of your pointers since posting, so I have bounced the light off a wall and also had the tripod set lower. The lower angle does look a lot better. As for the light, well I got more even exposure off the shadows but overall the room was too dark really for the camera to focus so most of the shots are blurry. I need to try it during the daytime with natural light and see how it goes. One other thing I noticed with the indirect light is the paintwork looked more like it does to the eye, the direct lighting over-enhanced where I'd put a darker brown wash over that wagon.
I agree about the aperture, I noticed the whole wagon seemed to be in focus compared to older shots I have done leaving the camera on auto.
Thanks for the pointers, I'll tidy up the best shot from the 2nd session and post it later and set up another session another day!
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On 11/02/2023 at 23:41, magmouse said:
Feel free to let us know how you get on and post results here, if you want. I’m happy for this comments section to be a place for discussion and sharing if that’s useful to people.
Well, here is my first go. I decided to go for the dodged background look and placed a sheet of white A4 behind my photo plank. There is a second sheet folded round to the left to reflect some light on to the front. Lighting was from a 6400K 30W CFL bulb in my modelling lamp. The light source is to the front and top left of the pic.
Camera settings were F8.0 (as low as I can stop it down to) and ISO 100. Focal length is 35.5mm. The exposure time was about 0.5s IIRC. That's one thing I need to do, note down my settings, I had to look on the picture info to recall the settings as I'd fiddle around with different ones but was then unable to recall what was for which shot! The model was about 4 feet from the camera and I zoomed in as much as I could before the autofocus stopped working.
The underframe needs more light so I think I might try bouncing the light off the walls and set a much longer exposure time as you do. I only have a limited to of direct sunlight coming in through the rooms window. I could always move my setup too. I can also go down to ISO80, so will give that a try too.
Feedback most welcome!
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Where is the "Holy Smoke!" button, not sure Craftsmanship quite cuts it.
That looks fantastic Nick, very well observed.
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That is really useful information, Nick. I use a tripod and a compact camera with decent zoom, looks like I could move it further back judging by your setup.
I've never thought to try and use manual settings but given I only just learnt how to take a proper picture of the moon in the last year, it's about time I tried on models.
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55 minutes ago, magmouse said:
Wow - thank you for going so far down the rabbit hole on this one. Fascinating stuff. Thinking about this in subjective terms, your last photo, showing the finished wagon, has a tonality that reminds me of some of the reference pictures I have been using. These show wagons in ex-works condition, and early enough to definitely be in the red livery (G.W.R lettering on the left, etc.). Looking at these and asking myself, "are these painted black?", my visual sense is quite happy to accept the answer "yes". The last picture in your post gets the same response from me.
You're welcome, Nick. I love understanding how things work and love a challenge in creating things too so this topic encompassed that. Maybe getting an SLR for my 18th birthday many decades ago and shooting many rolls of b/w also had an influence.
7460 does look very black doesn't it. Contrast that with what we would also say is a red wagon on the workbench and there is quite a difference in shade there due to less red spectrum that we might imagine. Similarly, looking at 632 in panchromatic, I would have said that is a grey wagon if I didn't know any better.
55 minutes ago, magmouse said:Of course, there are other photos that don't give that impression. The difficulty with all this is we are trying to pin down the timing of a change of colour of the wagons, where we have a good sense of the earliest and latest likely dates, but the available photographic chemistry is changing over the same period. As you say, going from known colours to an explanation of why they render in a particular way in a particular photo (the tomatoes) is one thing. Going from unknown chemistry back to specific colours, especially when one of them is grey anyway, is another.
I omitted to include some key date info in my post that you have brought up here as a very valid point. As you say, the change from red to grey livery also coincided with when panchromatic film stock* became available (mid nineteen noughties). Quite a lot of texts say it was prohibitively expensive so didn't come into common use until much later, so you might expect most pics of the era still to be using ortho film. Would the cost have been an issue to a large company like the railways? That really could throw a spanner in the works when trying to analyse a photo.
Another related thought, the penny really dropped as to where photographic grey liveries came from when reading about the monochromatic blue sensitive films.
*Edit, probably a more correct term for the era is plates rather than film stock.
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On 16/01/2023 at 22:18, 57xx said:
I'll have to chuck Mikkel's picture through my Orthochromatic filter in Photoshop ands see if I get the same results.
This statement has led me down a deep rabbit hole this week! 🙈
Whilst I had already made an orthochromatic filer in Photoshop, I decided to revisit it. During the research I discovered the information I had used was flawed (someone else on a 'tinternet forum trying to achieve the same thing) but I then able to find enough info to make a better version. I also found out that, as usual, there is a lot of conflicting data out there!
The first monochromatic films were blue sensitive, no response to greens, yellows or reds. Then along cam orthochromatic films where they extended the colour sensitivity to include greens and yellows, but still not reds. Here is where the first conflict of info comes - some say they were still hypersensitive to blue, others indicate a lessened sensitivity to blue. The later is true for modern film stocks. So I made two filters, each with a different response to blues.
Then came panchromatic film that included red sensitivity. Some info I have seen shows the sensitivity to peak in the reads (over exposing that part of the spectrum). however, the deeper you dig, the more you find that there are as many sensitivity ranges as there are brands and versions of film stock! So I put a finger in the air and created a filter for this too.
Here is one of the sites I used for research:
https://www.analog.cafe/r/ilford-ortho-plus-80-film-review-hz9m
Look at the first picture of the tomatoes to show the dramatic effect ortho film has.
This site was handy for adjusting the filters using a copy of the colour parrot picture dropped into the templates and tweaked to match the corresponding b/w images.
So what were the results? Read on!
Firstly Mikkel's pic.
Ortho:
Panchromatic:
In contrast to a regular greyscale conversion, you can notice a difference in the red and "black" In either case though, it doesn't take a great leap in imagination to realise a slightly different dirty shade of black on the axleboxes could easily match the grey shade the red gives.
On to Nick's pics. I deliberately chose to start with the pic with the worktop "clutter" on, as the background items help with visualising the way different colours get rendered in grey on the different film stocks.
Ortho:
Panchromatic:
And finally one more ortho pic:
My take-away from this is that trying to determine colours from b/w images is a bigger minefield than ever (as I think we already knew anyhow really). Without knowing the actual film stock used, lighting conditions, exposure, developing process etc on any given picture, you won't know how the colours have rendered in b/w. If you know for sure the colours of the original subject in the picture e.g. the tomatoes, then a keen eye can work out the type of film used. If you're trying to work out what shade of red or grey was used for example and if other items in the b/w picture are the same, I refer back to Nick's statement:
QuoteIt's amazing how easy it is for the eye/brain to be fooled, but careful observation can usually give some clues as to what is going on.
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On 05/01/2023 at 17:55, magmouse said:
1. I think the picture of 9669 strongly suggests they were - wheel rim, brake block, push rods, etc., all the same tone. It seems to me very unlikely the different materials and manufacturing processes involved would all arrive at the same 'natural' finish.
2. Why paint anything? But yes, a fair question, since a big lump of steel isn't going to rust much relative to the life of the item. Are wheels painted these days?
3. No idea.
Have a look at the whole picture:
The sun is high in the sky (see the shadows of the springs) leaving the sole bar in shadow - all but the front edge of the bottom flange, which just catches the light. That's why the sole bar looks darker. The darker end to the buffer beam is because the ends of the buffer beams are angled, so the L-section in the corner bends to tuck under and follow the diagonal cut of the beam. The light on the buffer beam ends is therefore at a skimming angle to the surface and lights it less brightly.
I'm convinced this wagon is all the same colour, and I am fairly sure (but less certain) it is grey, not black.
Nick.
I'm with you on it being grey, I feel Russel is mistaken in recalling them being black. There are plenty of pics in Atkins et al that steer towards them being grey. The shade was quite dark anyhow.
I'd always assumed the wheels to be black, but your picture is making me question that now. I'll have to chuck Mikkel's picture through my Orthochromatic filter in Photoshop ands see if I get the same results.
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On 03/01/2023 at 11:45, magmouse said:
Wagons are my favourite thing, and seem like a good 'warm up' for passenger stock and eventually locomotives.
They are for the discerning modeller. 😉They may lack the glamour of big locos and carriages but were the back bone of the railways and I too find them far more interesting to model.
On 03/01/2023 at 11:45, magmouse said:Weathering is a slightly chaotic mix of washes and dry brushing with enamel and acrylic paints, and weathering powders. I find the more layers of different elements I add, the better it becomes, as long as the overall effect is kept in check. Usually I go through a phase of 'this is hopeless' before arriving at something I like, so I think it is important to persevere and keep playing, but only adding a bit at a time with any one technique.
I wouldn't call it a chaotic mix, more an appropriate use of all the tools available. I don't get why some people insist on being a martyr and claiming things like "I only use washes/powders/airbrush"* when they ae all different tools to be used for the end goal and each with their own nuances to help bring out an overall effect when combined. As you say, layering is very important to build up the effect.
*Other techniques available
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One thing worth mentioning on undercoats, it's worth checking manufacturers recommendations for them. When I was using Halfords rattle cans for primer, I tended to use the grey for.. grey topcoat and red oxide for bauxite/oxide freights. Whilst browsing the Phoenix Precision site on time I noticed they recommend white as primer for their paints that I was using!
And as luck would have it I now can't find the page on their site that stated this to cite a reference source.
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On 04/06/2022 at 05:03, stevel said:
A very interesting post which answers a few questions for me, but leaves some more, to be answered. I have been thinking of drawing and printing a body of the 1854 class, and wondering if 2721 Hornby chassis, is a viable option.
A bit late to the conversation here, but... No, the Hornby chassis has the wheelbase wrong dimensions, I think it is the generic Jinty chassis. Either of the Bachmann ones should be ok (57xx or 8750).
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I love seeing a notification of a new entry in this blog. That is such an ingenious machine you have create. I too would love to see these creations in action.
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Damn, you have good eyes to see that at 6ft! You know you shouldn't be using binoculars though?
Joking aside, I find once you have seen things, you can't unsee them. It's like the sunken numbers plates and seamless join of the dome to boiler on the DJM 48xx jump out a mile at me every time I look at it, or the curved joint between the cap and main chimney on the Hattons Terrier.
Hopefully your 2nd one will be better, there looks to be some well turned out ones in the main thread.
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Dirty fingers: Trial and error with bricks and mortar
in The Farthing layouts
A blog by Mikkel in RMweb Blogs
Posted
Mikkel, Halfords paint is actually acrylic, though the key difference is that it is a solvent based one (I have yet to find a suitable solvent to dilute decanted paint and soon gave up on the idea). I'm thus guessing it's down to Vallejo being water based (right lines of thinking, just a subtle difference).