DavidK71

On 19/08/2011 at 18:08, 2mm Andy said:

They look really nice - difficult to believe that they're N gauge!

 

I use Games Workshop 'Purity Seal' satin varnish prior to applying transfers - that seems to give enough of a gloss finish to get the transfers to stick (although I still get the occasional disaster!)

Thanks! I intend to investigate 'Purity Seal' - if you can lay transfers on it then I should be able to just use that as the top varnish coat without needing to use another gloss layer to protect the decals. Is that what you do?

Where does the time go? I've at least managed to get a little more done on the Hawksworth coach: lining and numbering has now been applied to the sides:

The initial attempt at lining did not go well. I had hoped that the paint was sufficiently gloss that decals could be applied directly to it, so skipped applying a gloss varnish. Not a good idea: in particular the fact that the crimson had been sprayed on top of the cream meant that there was a step that the lining decals folded into. Applying Microsol just made the decals conform better to the uneven surface, making the unevenness more obvious.

After removing the first attempt, I glossed the sides with Halfords clear lacquer from a rattle can, which gives a nice, glossy finish. You have to be careful with it though as it's easy to get too thick a coat - the trick seems to be to keep the can moving quickly when spraying. This has given a much better surface for the decals. In places the carrier film is still visible where it catches the light, but I'm confident that a further layer of varnish will deal with that.

Anyway, once the decals are thoroughly dry, another gloss coat to seal them in, and then the next task will be to experiment with satin varnish, as the full gloss finish is just too shiny.

Some more progress with the LMS bogie has been made. To start with, all seemed fine: I glued on the overlays for the bogies, and the white metal axle boxes and springs. I then tried the slightly cheating method used earlier for the GWR bogies of not bothering with top hat bearings, and just letting the axles run in the holes in the axle boxes. However, that proved a definite no go: as the brass is a bit thiner (and therefore more flexible), and the bogie a bit wider, than the GWR ones, the axles kept coming out. Disaster!

As that wasn't going to work I carefully removed the axle boxes and dug out the top hat bearings I had. The holes in the bogie were enlarged for the top hat bearings with a 1.6mm drill bit - I used the somewhat unorthodox method of turning the drill bit by hand in the hole - as the brass is thin this doesn't take too long, and gives fine control. The bearings were pushed through and then filed back from the other side, the axle boxes glued back on, the bogie refolded, and, much to my relief, it worked 😃:

Thr photograph shows that I've attempted to make the bogie more rigid by attaching several pieces of plasticard rod transversely across the bogie frame, which seems to have worked quite well. The last photograph does demonstrate one mistake I have made, though: I've filed the top hat bearings too much, so that the axle doesn't fit snugly in them, but has rather too much play left and right. This doesn't seem to affect it's running, however. Next time I'll go easier with the filing.

On 10/08/2011 at 21:29, Etched Pixels said:

I file out the holes, I've never tried drilling them and from your photo I don't think I will either 8)

That sounds like a much better idea, to which I will definitely pay attention to next time!

On 10/08/2011 at 21:29, Etched Pixels said:

I've used very fine microstrip for rainstrips successfully, fine phosphor bronze wire also works but is trickier to fit to plastic roofs.

I had wondered about that, but wondered if the microstrip would stay stuck down, and how to glue it sufficiently. I should perhaps just give that a go if the tape doesn't work out.

On 10/08/2011 at 21:29, Etched Pixels said:

You might want to try a nut and bolt and a pair of washers one each side of the hole to straighten it out any further ?

Happily, it isn't as bad as the photograph makes it seem. I have flattened the etch a bit more and the assembled bogie seems to be okay when used under the Hawksworth coach.

While waiting for the lining and transfers to finish off the Hawksworth brake third, I've decided to start on a few other coaches, so a few days ago the postman brought a parcel from Ultima, containing a couple more Hawksworths (including a rather scary looking etch for GWR six-wheel bogies that we'll come back to later) and an LMS 50' full brake.

I've started in the same place as before, making up bogies. The photograph shows the current state, after removing the bogie etches from the fret, filing off the edges and drilling out the holes for the mounting screws:

On the left is a GWR bogie, with an LMS one on the right. After the last coach I'm feeling fairly comfortable with the GWR bogie: glue on the axle boxes and springs, fold into shape, insert wheels, and glue the corners together. The LMS bogie is going to be a little more interesting. As the photograph shoes the brass is somewhat thinner, and despite being as careful as I could, you can see that the metal around the bottom of the hole has started to tear as it was drilled. To fix this I've filed off the torn scraps and then re-flattened the etch by putting it in a vice between two steel rulers. You can also see that the LMS bogie won't be as rigid as the GWR one, as it doesn't fold up to give four corners that can be glued together. My current plan is to glue lengths of 1mm square rod in as bracing - we'll see how that goes.

There will also have to be some experimentation with the roof. The kit comes with an aluminium roof and the instructions describe using "Letraline" 0.5 mm tape to add the rain strips. Unfortunately it seems that this tape, at least in such thin widths, was discontinued a few years back (Letraset's whole range seems much smaller than it used to be) - there's a post from a certain well known coach-builder from this board commenting that he stock-piled what supplies he could get when they stopped making it. As an alternative I shall be trying Model Technics Trimline, a tape used for lining remote-control cars and similar. Has anyone tried this, or have any other suggestions of tape to try?

Sorry if this is a stupid question but is there any soldering involved in this kit? If not, what glue is used?

Definitely not a stupid question, as soldering irons generally scare me off. The kit comes with instructions that cover bogie and underframe construction both with and without soldering. I have gone for 'without' - I used slow-setting cyano-acrylate ("Slo-Zap superglue") for small parts, and Evostick Impact for the larger joins and for metal-plastic joins, where some flexibility in the joint is desirable.

No further progress until the N Gauge Society shop re-opens, but the nice weather today has allowed for a few rather better photographs to be taken outside:

On 20/07/2011 at 11:49, Sailor Charon said:

At the risk of this being another 'me too' type post, I have to say that that's looking really good.

All such posts are always welcome!

On 19/07/2011 at 09:00, Karhedron said:

That looks really good. The time you have spent preparing and experimenting has clearly paid off as the finish looks excellent.

Thank you 😀. It has been a very enjoyable experience, and I'm already planning more adventurous GWR coach projects ...

Time for another progress report ... After much cursing, bending of wire and test fitting, I now have filler pipes that I'm reasonably satisfied with. They aren't perfect, but are at least passable, and after several hours I reached the point of accepting I'd done my best. They still look somewhat over-scale to me, but I don't see any way round that. I definitely made a mistake by following the instructions, which deal with the filler pipes only after the roof has been painted and glued in place. In the end I have attached the pipes to the roof only, so that they just touch the coach ends, making it possible to remove the roof in the future. Once they were on, I re-sprayed the roof and very lightly glued it to the body.

Lots of progress has been made with the coach sides. I've acquired a can of Alfa Romeo AR530 red car paint (the same colour as used by Coachman, no less). This had to come from a supplier of custom paint as it is not that common - last used on 1980s Alfas, apparently. Given the propensity of 1980s Alfas to rust at the slightest provocation, there can't be many such cars still around. (Though of the ones that remain, I suppose that their owners must spend most of their time patching up the rust, so at least there will always be a market for this paint!) To demonstrate, I've further sprayed the test piece of plastic kit from before:

To recap, the cream is Vauxhall Gazelle Beige from a Hycote spray can, the light red sprayed horizontally in the bottom half is Vauxhall Crimson from the same source, and the wingtip is Railmatch BR Crimon, brush painted. The two new vertical strips of colour in the centre are, on the left, AR530, and on the right, Halfords Ford Cardinal red, which was mentioned in another RMWeb thread on the perennial question of BR crimson. As I think the picture shows, the Halfords red is too dark, while the AR530 is just a bit lighter than the Railmatch colour - in other words, just right 🙄. Being from a custom paint can, though, it's much less easy to spray than Halfords or Hycote paint - the droplets come out larger, and the spray doesn't seem to travel as far. The photograph shows that there's quite an 'orange peel' effect on the AR530 red, resulting from me spraying from too far away.

I decided to use Vauxhall Gazelle Beige and AR530 red for the coach sides. Several thin coats of Hycote white primer where applied to the sides to start with, followed by a coat of the beige. Once dry this was masked off, then the red applied. Given that spraying AR530 was proving difficult, I first sprayed Vauxhall Crimson and then a single coat of AR530 over the top of that, which seems to have worked out quite well. From doing all this I have learnt the value of test spraying before painting an actual model - for each colour I had to experiment to find the optimal distance to spray from, and how many passes of the can to use for a coat to get good coverage without using too much paint.

After discussion on D869's blog, I've also attempted to strengthen how the coach sides attach to the ends in two ways. The first has been to glue two vertical pieces of square 1mm plasticard rod to the brake end of the coach, giving a greater area to glue the sides to the end. This wasn't possible at the non-brake end, due to where the doors are on the coach sides. I've also glued some sections of 0.25mm plasticard strips to the folded up sections of the floor to provide something to glue the side to along its length. Testing indicates that the sides will fit nicely to all this, and should provide a sturdy coach.

At this point, I am in a position to test fit the coach sides to the body. Here is the result, with blutac holding the sides in place:

I have to say that I'm very pleased with the result so far. The last picture does show that I did not quite get the masking tape completely horizontal all the way along, though. In my defence, trying to align beige masking tape on a side you've just painted beige is annoyingly awkward. But still, I shall have to be more careful next time.

The next stage is to consider transfers and lining. I'm not completely sure that I want to line the coach - I am worried that it will look over-scale. Anyway, I will acquire lining from the N Gauge Society shop (this is the only source I know of, unless anyone has another suggestion) when it re-opens in August. Once that is done all that will remain is varnishing the sides, glazing, and final assembly. Then I'll have to decide what to build next...

On 13/07/2011 at 19:02, Etched Pixels said:

Don't see an obvious problem having measured a bit - you did notice they are not quite symmetrical ?

I did notice that 🙄, but as far as I can see, the tank cover isn't asymmetrical enough. Consider these two images:

http://www.ultima-mo...mages/1212a.jpg

http://www.rmweb.co....1585_169281.jpg

The first image is the drawing of the tank cover from the Ultima catalog, and it shows the position of the filler cap as being about 3/7 of the way along, which matches the actual etch. The second image is one of Kris' photographs from earlier in this thread. Note that on both visible tank covers, the filler cap is more like 1/4 of the way along. Of course it's hard to be sure from a photograph taken at an angle, but it does seem odd.

You should also be able to see the effect by using the cut-out roof guide from the Ultima instructions: stick one on a Hawksworth roof, use it to mark out the position of a tank cover, then stick a tank cover on. If the etch is right, the filler cap ought to then be on the coach centre-line, but it isn't for me ...

Time to dig out the GWR coach books and have a look. I'll have an investigate.

Thanks for this, and for the advice on the filler pipes. I will experiment further with the wire, and look into microstrip too.

More progress: the coach now has a roof:

As it came in the kit, the roof had a small bit of damage on one side, where it attached to the sprue. One of the first things I did on the kit was to clean this up by filling the affected part with Humbrol filler and then carefully sanding it back down. At the time this seemed like a pain but I'm glad that I did: while the area of damage on the lip of the roof can be found by looking very carefully, it's much better than it was.

One eBay purchase that I'm really pleased with is the hand-held Archimedes drill I used to drill the holes for the roof vents. My initial thought on reading the instructions was "How am I going to drill holes that small?" but a fortunate search on eBay solved the problem: with the drill I can hold the roof steady with one hand while using the drill with the other. Possibly everyone else already knows about these but I was impressed 🙄

The roof was sprayed with white primer underneath (to give a passable version of the gloss white ceiling of the prototype), grey primer on top, and then Halfords light grey bumper paint over that. The colour is actually a bit lighter than it appears in the photograph, due to less than ideal photographing conditions today.

One source of problems with the roof has been the etched header tank: the instruction diagram (and Kris' photos from earlier in this thread) show the header tank over the non-corridor side of the coach, as you would expect, but this leaves the filler cap in line with the roof vents, rather than the coach centreline, as it should be. Either the etch isn't quite right or I've mis-understood something - to me the filler cap should be more off-centre relative to the tank than it is in the etch. I've dealt with this by moving the header tank slightly towards the centreline, which shouldn't be too obvious.

Discussion of the header tank leads to a question for you all: the instructions describe forming the tank filler pipes from the supplied wire, but has anyone done this and been happy with the result? Despite several attempts I've not produced anything that I'm happy with. The real filler pipes follow the roof and side profiles very closely and are quite unobtrusive, but my attempts with wire sit too proud of the body, and also aren't particularly symmetrical. I'm debating whether it would be better to leave them off or not.

Work has now started on the last major thing: the sides. I've added a very slight tumblehome to the sides by the slightly scary process described in the instructions. It's possible I've been too chicken in doing this, but a recent inspection of the real coaches at Didcot reminded me that the tumblehome is very minor.

A little bit more progress over the weekend, resulting in the interior being finished:

The seats are folded pieces of coloured paper and seem to work quite well, though possibly I should have used a darker colour on the paper. The partitions have had a piece of plastic rod glued to the base and that, along with the seats, make them much easier to get into place than just having them balance on their edge. Lots of testing and trimming with the roof was needed to get everything fitting nicely, but the result is pleasing. On the embarrassing mistake front, note that two of the partitions are a little too short - I accidentally trimmed the bottom edge rather than the side, as I had intended. D'oh ... Also, for future reference it's well worth keeping the etched sides nearby to check that the partitions are in the right place relative to the windows in the sides - I nearly had a nasty mistake there.

Next up: the roof.

I have used Vauxhall Carmine Red for BR Crimson and was very pleased with the results. It is worth noting though that I applied it over a coat of red primer which gave a slightly deeper and more vivid colour than going over white. This was easy enough for me as I was painting plain crimson coaches. Since you are doing cream as well the white primer is probably a necessity.

Yes, I was struck that your carmine looked quite a bit deeper, though it is all hugely dependent on lighting levels and so on.

You might do better to apply the red over the cream (over the white primer); simpler to mask and less chance of the red looking pinkish.

That is in fact what I've done: I couldn't figure out any other sensible way to try to do it. I did want to try the red over a red primer, but that makes masking a problem.

Time for a status update. I have the usual modelling condition: I've not got as much done as I intended, and I've spent longer experimenting than anything else. Sigh.

Anyway, I've got the bogies painted, and I've sorted out my coupling problems, I hope:

Each bogie has attached to it a cut-down Peco ELC wagon coupler, glued to a piece of plasticard to get it to stick out far enough. For now the coupler mounts are only attached with blu-tac: I want to get a second coach and see how the gap works out round corners before permanently gluing them in place. The underframe has also partially been painted, and I've been playing with the interior, figuring out how it all fits together.

However, most time has gone into worrying about painting the etched sides. The plan is for carmine-and-cream livery. Precisely what colour or colours this might be is a controversial subject, judging by all the existing threads on the the topic, and I've no desire to get too involved: my plan is to find a pair of colours that I like, and go with that. I started by digging out from a cupboard the remains of an Airfix Blenheim kit (an outdated model of a rather outdated aircraft, even in its time) and have been trying different colours and finishes. The first result is that brush painting just isn't good enough: not really a huge surprise. That left me contemplating buying an airbrush, or experimenting with aerosol cans. I can see that in the long term airbrushing is the way to go, but for now, I've chosen to play with aerosols. Below is a wing sprayed with Vauxhall Gazelle Beige and Vauxhall Crimson:

For comparison, the tip of the wing has been brush painted with Railmatch BR Crimson. The cream / beige doesn't look bad at all. The Vauxhall Crimson is quite nice too, but the Railmatch colour looks very "plum" to me. This bit of plastic accompanied me to Didcot Railway Centre on Saturday, where it was compared against their autocoach. The red isn't bad, but it's not quite "blood" enough. I've got some Alfa-Romeo AR530 paint on order and we'll see how that works out. If I don't like it I'll go with the Vauxhall Crimson

Also worth mentioning is that this wing was my first attempt, using grey primer. Although the photograph doesn't show it well, there is a certain "greyness" to the cream that isn't quite right. A second wing piece using white primer gave a rather better colour, but there I made the mistake of holding the aerosol too far away: I got an 'orange peel' effect in the paint, presumably from it partially drying while travelling between the nozzle and the plastic. My best results come from holding the aerosol about 20cm away, initially not pointing at the part to be painted, start spraying then move over the part with a smooth back and forth action twice.

More experiments to follow...

On 07/06/2011 at 14:18, Karhedron said:

You have done a nice job putting that together, I will be watching with interest to see how the paintwork comes along. I agree that there are not many pictures of N gauge coach kits on the net so thanks for taking the time to provide us with this one.

Thanks - painting will be an interesting challenge, and one I will do a post on when I've got a bit further. I recently read your posts on the TPM full brake conversion and thought you got a nice finish on the sides on that. I was worried that using aerosols would give too thick a paint layer, but your results have encouraged me to try some experiments, and after a few practice runs on spare bits of old plastic model kits I've found that I can get a very thin primer layer with a Hycote car paint aerosol. Further experiments this week, with a bit of luck 😀

If it's any help for you, Mike Howarth has some internal plastic seating and corridor divides on Ebay at the moment

Thanks Michael. I'd like to have a look at this, but I couldn't find it on eBay: do you have an auction number for them? I tried searching in the "Railway Models" section of eBay for "Howarth" but got no hits.

Thank you to everyone who has made suggestions or provided encouragement. Building this is proving quite challenging but is also a lot of fun: if anyone out there like me is wondering if they've got the skills to do this, you should give it a go!

On 28/05/2011 at 21:46, Kris said:

I have quite a few more of this coach if needed. (I might have gone a little mad with the camera that day, whoops).

Thank you for those, they're very helpful: most of the photographs I've found on the Internet are from further away, so it's good to see the sides and underframe up close. I'm also pleased to see I got the shell vents on the right way round 🙄.

On 28/05/2011 at 22:36, Leicester Thumper said:

see if you can get hold of some Dapol extended couplings, see if you can't adapt them for the job?

I shall look into that. For the moment I've separated the Peco ELC coupler mounts I've been using from the bogie, and have re-attached them on the outside of the bogie. So far this is looking promising.

On 29/05/2011 at 10:34, PLD said:

My only worry with doing that is that the extra rolling resistance may not be significant on one coach but by the time you get a rake of six or seven together it adds up and some locos may start to struggle...

Yes, you could well be right there. I wasn't brave enough to try drilling out the holes for the bearings on my first bogie attempt, but in retrospect it is worth giving it a go. I think that when I get round to doing another of these coaches I'll order an extra set of bogies to have a go with and see what happens.

On 29/05/2011 at 10:34, PLD said:

As other have said, you need to put in at least the partitions in a corridor coach... as for the white metal seating again the worry is how much weight will that add to a ful rake of coaches? I use the plastic seating that Colin Ashby used to produce. I've seen someone else with something very similar recently (can't remember who - maybe someone else can?) It comes in about 6 inch lengths for you to cut up to suit.

The weight is a concern, and Bernard's comment makes me think I might get away without seats. I'm also considering simply printing a suitable pattern on a sheet of stiff A4 paper, from which I could cut out and fold simple seat shapes. Lots of experimentation ahead ...

As an extra thought, I took lots of photos of the E164 on the South Devon railway a few weeks back and could pop some of them up here it they would help your build.

Thank you for the kind comment. Also, yes please to the photographs, that would be very helpful.

I've recently embarked on my first N gauge coach kit, having previously only tackled simple wagon kits. The chosen model is an Ultima kit of a GWR Hawksworth corridor brake third, intended to be finished in carmine and cream. The eventual idea is to produce a whole rake of Hawksworth coaches, though I suspect that this will take me as long as Swindon took to build the real things. As I've never tackled such a project before I looked around on the Internet for advice or details of anyone attempting anything similar, but I didn't find very much. This thread is my attempt to detail what I found out by working on this: what follows might be of use to another beginner, but is not going to surprise any of the kit experts round here.

With that out of the way, where have I got to? First up were the bogies, done from Ultima's GWR 9ft GWR coach bogie etch. These were made by gluing the axleboxes onto the etched bogies while they were still flat, turning the bogies over, drilling out the axle holes a little, then folding up the bogies into the final shape. The result:

I left out the top hat bearings as being too fiddly to get into place, and this doesn't seem to have caused any problems: the bogies run very smoothly just in the holes in the axle boxes. Lesson one for the future: I should have drilled out the axle boxes a little more: in order to get the wheels to run free, the sides of the bogie are not quite vertical (which is more noticeable on the right hand bogie). The couplers are Peco ELC wagon couplings, with the mounts filed down to fit inside the bogies. I was very pleased with myself for getting that to work, but we'll come back to that in a moment ... All in all the bogies aren't perfect, but I'm happy with them as a first attempt.

The next stage was to fold up the floor, attach the underframe details, the ends and the bogie mounts to give a rolling frame. The V hangars on the brake end didn't seem to be in the right place, as compared with both the Comet 4mm kit and a photograph of the real thing, so this were carefully removed from the etch of the truss rods and moved to approximately the right place.

Lesson two for the future: be careful when attaching the dynamo to the underframe, as it can foul the bogie if it's too close to the end. The dynamo in the above is now slightly bent to provide enough clearance, though fortunately this isn't visible unless you turn the coach upside down. As a quick test, the sides and roof where put in place with blu-tac to check alignment (and with the roof the wrong way round, sigh 😠

Taking this photo I was feeling pretty pleased with how it was going, when it suddenly dawned on me that there's a rather obvious error. When fitting the couplers inside the bogie I'd tested with the floor resting on top of the bogies to check that the coupler protruded beyond the floor, but I'd failed to take into account the additional width of the ends, buffers and corridor connectors. As can be seen from the above photograph, there's no way two such coaches could be coupled together: the coupler is tucked far too much under the frame. Sound of palm hitting forehead ...

So, lesson three for the future: make sure that the coupler sticks out far enough. If I can remove the glued on coupler mount I will try a scheme of gluing the mount on the outside of the bogie, rather than the inside, which should give sufficient clearance: if that fails it may be necessary to carve up an old Farish bogie or similar for its spring-loaded mount and glue that on.

Aside from bogie woes, the next challenge will be to paint the underframe and build an interior. Are seats necessary? The coach won't be lit, so I'm not sure, though I see that P&D Marsh sell some white metal compartment seats which sound useful. I think that I'll assemble the interior and see how much is visible with the sides on first. Beyond that we get into painting the roof and sides, for which I suspect I shall need to invest in an airbrush. Gulp.