In the last few days, I’ve been attempting to finish these Chivers 21 tonners, along with painting a few other vehicles – it makes sense to take the lid off the paint as few times as possible; if you have four wagon underframes to paint without an airbrush, this is a good time saving solution. You keep going until you run out of paint, and allow to dry rather than doing the whole thing at once and having a lot of paint you then don’t use. The tin thus goes further and lasts longer. Given the price of Humbrol this is just as well!

The paint details are hardly earth-shattering: Halfords red primer followed up with Humbrol matt chocolate (no. 98) for the underframe (thanks to Pennine MC for that recommendation). This shows the other benefit of batch painting – all those fiddly detail painting jobs become much more time and paint efficient. I undercoated the vac’ pipes and axlebox covers with white before the yellow/red first since neither colour covers well.

The upended views show the difference between the 1/119 (twin cylinders and a changeover lever) and 1/120 (lots of interesting linkages which you can barely see). I’ve shown these before, but it’s much clearer under a coat of paint.

1/119

1/120

Lettering: Using Model Master transfers over a couple of coats of Klear brushed on. I’ve since put the end-door stripes on and sealed the lot with more Klear and a spray of Testor’s Dullcote to matt everything down. These transfers were a complete pain, mostly because of their ‘peelable varnish coat’. If it becomes even slightly too wet, it parts company from the lettering. Not an enormous problem for the relatively big wagon numbers, but the smaller graphics, especially the ‘To work within South Wales and Monmouthshire* only’ tend to fall apart – I experienced a 50% failure rate which means only two wagons of the batch of three are fully lettered.

This highlights a wider problem with correct lettering for wagon kits. I’m fairly sure that these legends appear on the old Woodhead sheets (which we still have and are just about useable), and on the Cambridge Custom Transfers sheets, but that’s being wise after the event. I did dig out the HMRS sheet I have, remembered how incomplete it is relative to the old Woodhead sheets, and promptly put it away again. If it wasn’t for these geriatric Woodhead sheets, I’d have real problems for things like these working instructions and special brandings. It’s an issue I’ll encounter it again with the 21ton VB hopper conversion I have on the go (more later)…

Adam

*I do like the rather quaint distinction between the two. NB not all of these wagons had that branding – there were lots of different ones – and some were not branded at all (one of mine is numbered accordingly)