Castle Aching

[nick_bastable]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

There has been some talk of Posca pens and, IIRC, Mikkel has used them on coaches.

 

Well I thought I'd give it a go.

 

Now if there is one thing the world is not short of it's crudely painted Ratio 4-wheelers.  One such had come in amongst a lot I bought some time ago. 

 

 

So no loss as the subject of an experiment. I broke it down, removed the glazing and covered sprayed with Halfords primer.  The lower body was brush-painted but the ivory upper panels and beading were coloured using Posca pens. 

 

 

I learnt a few lessons:

 

- I need practice.  It was vastly quicker than brush painting, but the result not yet to the standard I want.  Still, a similar result in a fraction of the time.

 

- The thinnest pen, 0.7mm, still cannot get everywhere it needs to, so a brush is required

 

- The ivory needed at least two coats, but, then, the hand-painted body I did some time ago needed at least three!

 

- The thick pen was great for filling in the panels, but I need a thinner one of the same colour to reach the nooks, crannies and corners. 

 

 

All in all I was pleased and will consider this method in future. 

 

close but no cigar and port yet    your improving with every effort   ( unlike my own pathetic efforts)

 

Nick

[Caley Jim]

8 hours ago, St Enodoc said:

Shirley "Embra" would have got its strawberries from the Carse of Gowrie, by means of the Caledonian Railway?

It would depend on the time of year. Strawberries would be ready much earlier in Semblance than they would be in the Carse, or the Clyde Valley for that matter. The later crops up here would then go south after their season had finished. Remember, we're talking here of pre-pollytunnel days. 

 

Jim 

Edited March 6, 2019 by Caley Jim
Edited for typos

[Hroth]

7 hours ago, nick_bastable said:

close but no cigar and port yet    your improving with every effort   ( unlike my own pathetic efforts)

 

Nick

Then again, Edwardians last shot is like viewing it at 6" through a magnifying glass.

 

Try this

At Normal Viewing Distance, I'd award the Cigar, but no Port, as that wouldn't help matters subsequently...

[Nearholmer]

That way of applying g the livery certainly looks worthy of pursuit ......  still liking the colours.

[Northroader]

I hope you stripped the old paint off first, you didn’t mention this?

[Edwardian]

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

That way of applying g the livery certainly looks worthy of pursuit ......  still liking the colours.

 

I am minded to stick to the green and am considering sticking to brush painting.  It is a green I like very much.  I find yellow greens very warm and appealing. This is the same colour I used for the lighter locomotive shade, but darkened a little with black. 

 

I prefer it to any of the rattle can shades I experimented with last year.  I think that it might claim to represent a shade of chrome green.  We had a discussion about the sort of paints available in the pre-Grouping period.  Alas, this has not yet made the Index, but from what little I know concerning pigments, I would have thought it would have been the sort of thing available.  One thinks of the Highland and Cambrian Rys. 

 

Britannica.com has this to say, which, I must say, makes its use on railway carriages seem entirely sensible:

 

Chrome oxide green, which is nearly pure Cr2O3, is the most stable green pigment known. It is used for colouring roofing granules, cements, and plasters. It is also employed as a fine powder for polishing. Chromium yellow varies greatly in the shades available and is essentially lead chromate, or crocoite. This pigment makes an excellent paint for both wood and metal. Zinc yellow, a basic zinc chromate, is used as a corrosion-inhibiting primer on aircraft parts fabricated from aluminum or magnesium. Molybdate orange is a combination of lead chromate with molybdenum salts. Chrome green is a mixture of lead chromate with iron blue. This pigment has excellent covering and hiding power and is widely used in paints.

 

I misremembered Mikkel's method for upper panels and shall give this a go. I will see if I cannot find an ivory shade that does not require mixing.  I will then see which method suits best. 

 

Stephen, I knew, had used the Posca pen for lining, but was not, I think, the first to post concerning their use?

 

Memory shot as you can see, so apologies to the true pioneer. 

 

4 minutes ago, Northroader said:

I hope you stripped the old paint off first, you didn’t mention this?

 

No, I did not.  It is only a test piece.  I accepted some surface irregularities, but not enough to invalidate the test.  It was never intended to use this coach. It was badly made and does not even sit squarely on the track, and a re-painted Ratio GW 4-wheeler generally only ever looks like a a re-painted Ratio GW 4-wheeler!  It does suggest how the cut-down Triangs would look if treated likewise, so a relevant test subject.   

[Nearholmer]

The grounded coach body in this page of my thread https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/120371-deliberately-old-fashioned-0-scale/&page=5&tab=comments#comment-2661340 was done using what I think is the technique advocated by Mikkel - a gentle 'blob' of paint into the middle of the panel, then a combination of natural flow and the lightest of teasing with the brush to get it into the corners.

 

It was all heavily weathered afterwards, to make it look very faded, so doesn't show-up very well, but it was actually a pretty neat job, and the technique is not at all difficult.

 

[Edwardian]

I have updated the Index to include information on WNR locomotive and coach livery.  

[Caley Jim]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

 - a gentle 'blob' of paint into the middle of the panel, then a combination of natural flow and the lightest of teasing with the brush to get it into the corners.

This is exactly the technique I use in 2mm, using thinned enamel.  I found I needed to apply several coats to get adequate coverage, but that may be due to how much I thinned the paint.

 

 

Edited March 6, 2019 by Caley Jim
Edited for typos

[Edwardian]

I am in awe.  I can't get it that good at twice the size!

[Martin S-C]

How do you possibly model safety chains in 2mm? I can't believe this is a thing.

[Argos]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

I am in awe.  I can't get it that good at twice the size!

 

Jim cheats, he owns a shrink ray.....

[Guy Rixon]

20 hours ago, Tom Burnham said:

There's a photo in the Bexley Libraries collection of a "strawberry train" being loaded at Bexley station in 1905 (when it was still just about a Kent village) - the first 2 vehicles at any rate appear to be passenger-rated ventilated vans.  At a casual glance I can't see any reference to them in Gould's book on SE&C carriages.
https://www.boroughphotos.org/bexley/pcd_2211/

Interesting photo. Those are not the ex-SER or SECR-built grand-vitesse luggage-vans, which are the most-logical vans to see on this traffic: we know this because they have single-arc roofs. Neither are they the ex-LCDR equivalent as the roofs are too high and too curved. They look most like MR vehicles such as D418. One supposes that the train is loading to go outside SECR territory.

[DonB]

Item in last night's Midlands news.... Rosetti exhibition at Wightick Manor of National Trust paintings and sketches ... iplayer https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00034sl/midlands-today-evening-news-05032019 starts 19 minutes in. 

followed by item on new road crossing gates for SVR

 

Sorry but the TV item only available til 7pm today 

 

Details of exhibition at https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/wightwick-manor-and-gardens

Edited March 6, 2019 by DonB
Venue corrected

[Guy Rixon]

On 05/03/2019 at 18:45, Nearholmer said:

Kent is an interesting question ........ knowing the SER/LCDR, fruit probably went in sheeted opens, the distances to market being short anyway. These railways certainly had a few isolated sidings, direct into orchards. The SR doesn't seem to have built fruit vans, although it inherited lots, and I suspect that the standard passenger-rated LWB vans might have been used for domestic fruit traffic.

The SER, LCDR and SECR didn't get much fruit traffic from Kent, because the growers preferred to send their produce by road. The method was to load up a horse-drawn wagon in daylight, drive to London overnight, sell the stuff off the wagon as soon as the buyers showed up, between 04:00 and 05:00, and be either off home or in the pub by daylight.

 

There is exactly one, precious photo that I know of showing an SECR vehicle being loaded with Kentish fruit (or possibly Fruit of Kent) and it's almost certainly a grand-vitesse luggage van. I have a print somewhere.

 

PS: subsequent research (see my "Strand" thread for details) has shown that the SECR actually moved a lot of fruit in season, running (in 1900) 10 or more special trains every day to do it. Vans, rather than open wagons, are specified in the original working-instructions, and the use of some MR vehicles is confirmed there. Whether the rail traffic was significant relative to the road traffic is still unclear

Edited May 10, 2019 by Guy Rixon
Update with new information

[Nearholmer]

Interesting, and precisely how it was done, except that the wagon was a Thames Trader, when I remember it. That method can only have applied up to a certain distance out, though, unless they had very fast horses.

 

All this fruit talk has reminded me that a friend once mentioned to me that one of the Manchester termini had a “fruit dock”, like a milk dock - it was probably the LNWR, giv n the individual’s deep knowledge of that company.

 

anyway, here is a nice fruit van model, by Carette c1910.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Stephen, I knew, had used the Posca pen for lining, but was not, I think, the first to post concerning their use?

 

I was not making any claim to priority! - merely reporting my own tentative experience. In fact I had missed or forgotten Mikkel's use of them; I was independently made aware of their existence by a mention on Grahame's London Bridge topic. 

 

I didn't offer any photos, as my experiments so far have been a bit rough and ready, but here's an attempt at Midland-esque livery on a Hornby clerestory. The base is an undercoat of Halfords red primer, followed by Halfords Rover Damask Red. Straw 0.7 mm Posca then black ink with a 0.4 mm Rotring nib:

 

 

A merciless enlargement (photos of a given pixel size seem to be displayed larger on the new forum software, which is an embarrassment looking back) - where did all that dust spring from? 

 

 

Achieving consistency is the challenge, only practice will lead to improvement. Also I unwisely painted the bolections first; I should have done this last. I have a pile of red-painted clerestory bodies - they can always be dunked in the stripper if I run out!

 

For the grab handles, I used a Posca gold pen. I used a gold pen and then a fine brush for black as a teenager; I'm not yet at the point where I feel I'm surpassing my teenage efforts:

 

 

Humbrol No. 20 by brush straight onto the plastic. Ah the innocence of youth!

 

Apologies for intruding my stuff.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Compound2632

[Edwardian]

Very good work, Stephen.  With the Midland livery, you have no choice, but I found I did not get on well with trying to add gold borders to the black lining. You can get away with omitting it in liveries with light upper panels, e.g. GW cream.  

[Shadow]

54 minutes ago, Argos said:

 

Jim cheats, he owns a shrink ray.....

 

Or has a trained pet spider!

[Compound2632]

9 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Very good work, Stephen.  With the Midland livery, you have no choice, but I found I did not get on well with trying to add gold borders to the black lining. You can get away with omitting it in liveries with light upper panels, e.g. GW cream.  

 

I'm adding black over the "gold" - but following in the footsteps of Larry Goddard (Coachmann as was), no longer using gold but a yellowish shade that gives the impression of gold. If got right, I should have a 1 1/4" black line (0.4 mm) between two 1/2" yellow lines (0.15 mm).

Edited March 6, 2019 by Compound2632

[Edwardian]

10 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I'm adding black over the "gold" - but following in the footsteps of Larry Goddard (Coachmann as was), no longer using gold but a yellowish shade that gives the impression of gold. If got right, I should have a 1 1/4" black line (0.4 mm) between two 1/2" yellow lines (0.15 mm).

 

Yes, I was planning to use yellow for gold before I decided I could be @resd.

 

Mind you, I will need Midland clerestories and ex-MR 6-wheelers still in MR livery run by the MGN, so I will have to tackle the livery at some stage. 

[uax6]

I've just added the yellow to the second side of My HR banker, and I'm using Larry's mix for the gold/straw colour Humbrol 7 and 69 mixed 1:1. I'm using a set of bow pens that a friend got me off a car boot for £4. This is the first side:

 

 

I have to say that although it is a little nerve racking, it is actually quite therapeutic to do. I'm not looking forward to the yellow on the boiler bands, but at least with the 1st LMS red livery I only have to do behind the smokebox and the cab front.

 

Andy G

[Caley Jim]

3 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

How do you possibly model safety chains in 2mm? I can't believe this is a thing.

With difficulty!  I have to confess that I've given up on that.  Life is now too short!

 

2 hours ago, Argos said:

 

Jim cheats, he owns a shrink ray.....

Whaur's the 'Cheeky b****r' button when you need it!!   

 

Jim

[Edwardian]

I took Stephen's tip of using a ruler, but, while I note a slight improvement at normal viewing distances, close up it's no better!

[nick_bastable]

but how does it look at normal viewing distance now ?

 

Nick