Blog- The GC and Met in OO - Current Projects

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Tiring of blasting through a rake of PO wagons, and wanting to make a start on some projects that had been languishing on a shelf for a few years, a few weeks ago I pulled down an OO Graham Farish mainline carriage and had a good look at what it would take to GCR-ise it.

 

To be fair, it is already rather close. The compartment side doesn't really need anything doing to it, and the corridor side has the right arrangement of wide and narrow windows. I rather think the only real alteration necessary is to scribe in panel joints at alternate narrow windows to suggest doors down the length of the carriage.

 

Having made that tweak, I took the roof and glazing out and painted the interior. Even this made a huge difference, and when I repainted the teak and pencilled in matchboarding below the waist, the carriage was pretty much finished. Not bad for maybe a weeks' work.

 

I then made a start repainting an LNER A5 into GCR condition. Of course, a repaint is not the only thing to do; I had to fabricate new cabsheets out of plastic sheet (in 1924 the entire class was fitted with side window cabs, previous to which they had cut out cabs). Once I had done this I made the mistake of painting the model in Humbrol gloss brunswick green, not realising it would be 3 days before I could touch it again.

 

Whilst waiting to be able to return to the A5 I made a start on another GF carriage... and then a silhouette cutter turned up.

 

So today has seen me not working on the tank engine, or on the carriage, but rather scanning carriage drawings from George Dow's 'Great Central' and tracing over them in the silhouette cutter design software. My word this is a useful tool!- two hours to draw it up, five minutes to cut it to a far great degree of precision than I could ever manage by hand. The problem now is that I only have 20 thou plastic in stock at the moment; which is a little too thick for the cutter. So I've ordered some sheets of 10 thou.... which should arrive next week sometime.

 

In the meantime I guess I can use the delay to get one of the other projects off the workbench.

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