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Mol's MSC Layout: "The Boysnope Bump"


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5 minutes ago, Wrenn said:

Look forward to seeing your step by step pictures. I think it's great to share ones modelling techniques and ideas.

Absolutely!

And indirectly you have pushed me into making some decisions that needed making and the layout has made more progress than it otherwise would have done. Thanks!

 

I'm really enjoying the scenery stages, and actually getting a layout close to being finished for the first time ever. I'm aware that the rolling stock is taking a back seat at the moment (particularly the Hudswell Clarke diesel loco) but I'll get back to that soon. The whole point of this hobby is to do something enjoyable and at the moment I'm enjoying making stinging nettles and chain-link fences!

 

Here's a nice photo that brings together the loco, the scenery and the chain-link fence! Looking at this, my next flavour of weed needs to be cow parsley. Once I've finished the nettles...

26.jpg.650b85b0f50d04bd3f64c898a32a9177.jpg

Cheers,

Mol

 

 

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Bits of the chain link fence still exist among the trees that have taken over this scene. 

I have bought a kit from KS Laser Designs which looks pretty good for the fence. 

Watch this space for pics once I have painted and installed it! 

DD27BD27-0051-4398-A72D-4BE878F14655.jpeg

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The patches of nettles have made good progress today, but are taking longer than anticipated because I decided to make them bigger. Still, they're all gluing in now and will be ready for their final paint job tomorrow.

fence_2.jpg.2f57b1ae5319e9ee72058f3e47fa26f8.jpg

In the mean time I have also painted the posts for the chainlink fence, and drilled the holes for them. The main section of fence runs through the middle of the nettle patch I am making. I have trial-fitted the posts but they have come out again until the nettles are painted. I'll probably lay some more grass around the base of the fence before I put it in, too. I'm quite pleased by the impression given by the fence posts though, and I'm looking forward to getting the mesh and barbed wire fitted (which will no doubt be a fiddly job).

The little gravelled patch between the nettles will be the location for the telephone to MSC Railway Control in Partington. That will be modelled on the old 1930s one I found in the undergrowth on on one of my walks along this part of the canal bank.

fence_1.jpg.4291c5a54681c88c4e4c2b087003c286.jpg

In the background of that photo you can also see the newly-laid siding into the creosoting plant, which will fed from the fiddle yard sector plate when I have built that.

I thought I'd better check the clearances to my proposed gatepost locations where this track goes through the fence, so I got out my largest wagon, an MSC 'Parrot', which I really need to finish off.

It was fine through the gateway, but had some pretty tight clearances past some of the weeds in the sidings. If I build an MSC coach in future, I think it will have to be restricted to the main line!

parrot.jpg.0a33871f4cff31929236276847f94b19.jpg

 

 

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Thanks Wrenn! The nettles still need a spray of darker green to tone them down, and then I'll put together the illustrated step-by-step guide.

 

The fence posts are from KS Laser Designs, they're laser-cut from MDF and are pretty convincing once painted. The kit also contains the mesh and barbed wire which I will fit later this week hopefully.

I think I am going to try and tie them on with fine wire rather than the glue suggested in the instructions, but it might be more difficult than I am hoping.

I think the fence would have been fairly recently installed at the time period of my model so I'm not going to weather it much.

I have a matching set of gates from the same supplier, for where the siding goes through the fence.

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I’m beginning to wonder if I need the bow of a ship embedded in the canal bank at the front of my layout.

Despite the optimism on the news, the Ever Grounded still seems stuck!

 

Edit: She's on her way now! Hopefully bringing all our new toys!

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OK, so here's a step-by-step guide to the stinging nettles, part 1.

 

Firstly, I generally coat all the areas of the board to be come soil with a brown gunge of polyfiller powder, brown poster paint, PVA and water, and then sprinke brown ballast on it. As well as making it the right colour it gives a bit of texture and I find the static grass works better than on a perfectly flat surface.

Once that's all set, it's time to prepare the nettle patch.

 

Step 1 is to paint on dilute PVA (about 1:1)

nettles_stage1.jpg.2694e3f7ff178c402bf83a07ed3b0d42.jpg

Then sprinkle on a bit of coarse green sponge flock:

nettles_stage2.jpg.f588a4ee2e760e5e5fe18dc53b3f42ac.jpg

Now apply longish static grass, working with darkish green. Exact colour doesn't matter too much.

nettles_stage3.jpg.63dca0983463cb63ed0a413f3b960cc2.jpg

 

Leave that to dry overnight.

 

Meanwhile, prepare the stems. I used green scene 'plant stems' and cut each one into 3 pieces of varying lengths. Anything from about 10mm to 35mm will do, but most of them in the middle of that range.

Make at least a hundred of them.

nettles_stage4.jpg.df932e9279922070734c649356390727.jpg

Then pick up each stem, dip it in the dilute PVA left over from what you spread on the baseboard, it should look like this:

nettles_stage5.jpg.9eb46032bea9c5aa88a74a97e0ecc565.jpg

Now pull it through a heap of fine mid-green flock and it will end up like this:

nettles_stage6.jpg.9fc4e666b5f3b46e68cb4c28b8f29db5.jpg

Do all the stems. They only take a few seconds each, fortunately. Here is about half of what I used for the nettle patches featured here:

nettles_stage7.jpg.c8b664ae45ab48792e28e8cdb719471d.jpg

 

It's now time to go back to the baseboard. Hoover off the excess static grass and you should have something that looks like this:

nettles_stage8.jpg.da136e865e0ca6b06d1724ada3ce70e3.jpg

Taking some more of that dilute PVA and a flat brush, apply some glue to the top of the grass stems like this:

nettles_stage9.jpg.fcd6b3d1e51391f7bdf4c975c978381c.jpg

And then sprinkle on some more of the fine flock you used for the stems:

nettles_stage10.jpg.a50e0c4d77d506c939d39d27c07c85e2.jpg

Leave that to dry overnight.

(and I'm going to move on to a new post)

 

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Nettles Part 2

Once the flock has stuck, hoover off the loose material and it should look like this:

nettles_stage11.jpg.72274257dba6ee7af5da3e6ad6e63efe.jpg

As well as providing a fairly good impression of undergrowth, this provides a good structure for inserting the stems and holding them upright.

Take a stem, put a nice blob of Copydex on the base:

nettles_stage12.jpg.634ca6a6279c9796591d07f2ff79f0bb.jpg

Then insert it vertically into the nettle patch. It should stay vertical or nearly so, if it angles over a bit don't worry as you don't want them too uniform.

nettles_stage13.jpg.36cec15cddf989242e990c6b950aae8b.jpg

Continue with more stems, working from the back towards yourself is easiest, and I tend to put the taller stems in the middle and the shorter ones round the edge, but with plenty of randomness too:

nettles_stage14.jpg.299ff79897e9a02533f3352760bf868c.jpg

Keep going until you've filled the whole patch, then leave it to dry overnight:

nettles_stage15.jpg.7a33accedbb98f1808352579e60b327a.jpg

 

In reality at this point I decided my nettle patches needed to be bigger, so I went through all the above steps again to enlarge them. I tried to rush some of the 'leave to dry overnight' steps and regretted it, so take your time!

 

I'll move on to the third post at this point.

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Nettles Part 3:

I'm modelling mid to late summer when the nettles would be a darker shade. I could have used different flocks etc, but I was working with what I had in stock. Instead I decided to paint them after installation, which actually worked pretty well in tying together the various colours without them becoming entirely uniform.

I roughly masked off each patch with strips of cardboard

nettles_stage16.jpg.6ac8cb786b82dcfda9a604b343acb144.jpg

I then sprayed with Tamiya XF-26 'deep green' using my airbrush. I l like the Tamiya acrylic paints because they have a great range of colours, can be sprayed without thinning, and clean up with water.

This isn't a precision job by any means, and doesn't need a fancy airbrush. The aim is to darken everything, but not to achieve total uniformity.

nettles_stage17.jpg.eab79c577d24ac73266f980f44280582.jpg

So there we are, another couple of nettle patches ready to sting the long-suffering shunter when he goes to change the points!

 

Here are two of the other patches I did previously with the same methods:

nettles2.jpg.c2efdb2006203cc3729dd17b44381723.jpgtree3.jpg.36f37b3ba0c21f3ee8d74920b0194991.jpg

 

That's enough writing for now, I'd best get back to the making!

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1 minute ago, Wrenn said:

Yes it will be interesting to see how Mols vegetables will turn out like. Going off the vegetation being modelled they will be spot on.

They're delicious - I'm just about to harvest some purple sprouting broccoli to go with my tea (which also includes some of last summer's climbing squash).

Note the construction of the vegetable bed...

image.png.782fa4b7589b682f61b7e7b6340ec102.png

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Now, I must confess to having had a small 'accident' today.

 

I need a buffer stop for my siding, so I had a look through my MSC Railway photos and found that there was a quite distinctive rail-built type that was widely used.

Google told me that Ragstone Models made 7mm scale buffer stops and indeed they have an excellent range. The LBSC design is the closest to the MSC type, so I bought one of them.

 

Now, I don't know if other people do this, but if I'm placing an order I tend to have a quick look through the rest of their catalogue to see if there's anything else I might want. In theory this is to save on postage costs, in practice it is very dangerous.

Fortunately the obscurity of my MSC prototype protects me to some extent, but it turns out that Ragstone Models now sell the Agenoria range...

Costing about 20 times the price of the buffer stop kit, I now have another kit to add to the queue of unbuilt locos. Oops.

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7 minutes ago, Wrenn said:

You are teasing but hats off Mol great vegetable raised bed.

I bought the hardwood railway sleepers from a local supplier, but when they arrived there was something odd about them - the drilled holes didn't match any of the common UK baseplates or chairs. I asked the guy who delivered them and he said they were imported from Belgium! And then looked at me very oddly, understandable really given that I had identified them as foreign from the hole patten!

I borrowed some vintage LNWR sleeper dogs for shifting them, which made the work much easier as I did it almost all on my own.

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Not much time for modelling yesterday or today as work has been very busy, but I have made a start installing the fence. 

The aluminium mesh was far too shiny so I toned it down with a light spray of an earthy colour. I should have painted the horizontal wire too, that’s not part of the kit but is a fine copper-plated steel wire. I’ll have to touch that in afterwards or maybe a brush of chemical black. I think I’d have probably lost most of the paint off it during installation anyway. 

I have been using fine copper wire through the holes in the posts to tie the mesh and the horizontal wire in place. This seems to work quite well though it’s a little fiddly. I can use the same approach for the barbed wire at the top. 

6ED10460-DA6C-4302-8159-5655FAB0DE5C.jpeg.438c0ba32fd4362d5b7dcda0364e6158.jpeg

 

I’ve realised I can’t finish this length of fence until I have made the gates and gateposts so that will be the next job. 

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On 28/03/2021 at 13:00, Mol_PMB said:

----8<---- A few lines deleted

 

fence_2.jpg.2f57b1ae5319e9ee72058f3e47fa26f8.jpg

 

 

 

fence_1.jpg.4291c5a54681c88c4e4c2b087003c286.jpg

 

 

I do like how this is coming on blending in nicely. I need to re-read this thread as there is a lot of good information.

Question, where did you get your two point levers from ?

Regards

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5 minutes ago, steaming_chris said:

 

I do like how this is coming on blending in nicely. I need to re-read this thread as there is a lot of good information.

Question, where did you get your two point levers from ?

Regards

Thanks!

The point levers are from Duncan Models.

They're a little unusual (actually an LNWR type) but correct for this part of the MSC Railway.

http://www.duncanmodels.co.uk/assorted_detailing_items_price_list_main.htm

If you drop an email to Andy Duncan you'll find him very helpful. I bought loads of detail bits and pieces from him a couple of months back, and am very pleased with all of them.

 

Incidentally the fence now has its barbed wire fitted:

fence_3.jpg.ba0f01b7d02c16ebd4282e9a72fe2084.jpg

This is a rather cruel close-up and the mesh and wire look a bit heavy from this close. From a normal viewing distance it looks fine to me.

 

That tub behind the fence is weighting down something which will form the base of my first building. This corner of the layout with the creosoting plant uses a bit more modeller's licence than the rest, I'm not slavishly copying reality.

However I'm trying to get the right feel for a light industry built in the 1950s, sectional buildings and plenty of asbestos-reinforced cement. When I saw the Skytrex 1940s prefab house kit I thought it would be a good basis for a mess-room for the sawmill workers, it arrived today so I've made a start on it this evening. I'm only using half the kit, building it as a low relief, and I'm modifying some of the bits to suit my needs - half of it will be washroom and toilet facilities, the other half will have tea-making facilities and somewhere to sit.

messroom.jpg.5127f083cd4e18148aa3067e5191ff25.jpg

 

I'm wondering if I can use some of the left-over parts to make a little control room / office in the creosoting plant itself.

 

Actually, to call the Skytrex product a kit is a bit generous. It's more of a scratch aid, containing sides, ends, roof and chimney but no floor or internal structure, and no details like door handles, gutters etc. The instructions are not specific to this model and not very helpful at all.

Still, what you do get is very crisply moulded and none of my parts had any warping or surface defects, so they will form the basis of a nice model I think. The structure is loosely based on the products of UNI-SECO which made a lot of sectional buildings during and after WWII.

This is what it's supposed to look like if you don't cut it in half and block up a load of windows!

https://skytrex.com/collections/o-gauge/products/7-182-1940-s-pre-fab-bungalow

 

 

 

 

 

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40 minutes ago, Mol_PMB said:

Thanks!

The point levers are from Duncan Models.

They're a little unusual (actually an LNWR type) but correct for this part of the MSC Railway.

http://www.duncanmodels.co.uk/assorted_detailing_items_price_list_main.htm

If you drop an email to Andy Duncan you'll find him very helpful. I bought loads of detail bits and pieces from him a couple of months back, and am very pleased with all of them.

 

 

Thank you Mol for the information

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