DayReturn

You can probably say that this is the exception that proves the rule, but I think you will find that the Tri-ang/Rovex/Trackmaster R11 box van, in a wide choice of colours, is a surprisingly faithful representation of a LYR Diagram 20 Meat Van. Dimensionally it matches the David Geen equivalent very closely indeed. And there must be thoooousands of them, mostly in landfill sites.

It looks wonderfully dismal! You missed out the grey circles of chewing gum though, and the unmentionable…

Hmm … I could say a few things about Merton and Croydon and Sutton boroughs, but here is not the place! As with St Helier Estate, so outside my door. Once upon a time we had proper interwoven paving on our pavements. In the eighties that got stylised and replaced with 30cm square (I think) easy-maintenance blocks, which easily migrated and easily broke and after not long, looked shambolic and hazardous. So about 10 years ago they just tarmacked the pavement. Across the road, a new private development included proper paving and planters; a stark contrast to the budget-side of the street. Meanwhile at the same time the posh streets of Wimbledon Village got real boulevard style paving. I calculated that my street pays 3times more council tax per metre of street than the fancy avenues by the Common! Off topic except that you may want to assess the council tax bands of your model street before settling on its features and furnishings!

Tbh I used the same depth of cut for the embossing as for the edge cuts on this one. Maximum reliable cut depth won’t go through 20 thou styrene so you have to finish the edge cuts by bend and snap, or with a knife, or a judicious combination of both. But IIRC you have 20 depth settings (I’ve used the lightest ones to cut big wagon letter shapes on waterslide transfer paper), and you can specify different settings for each colour of your original CAD drawing, to get shallow and deep cuts on one job. I’ve also made a scriber tool to use alongside the cutting tool. The collet for that will also take a pen etc. There are two tool holders on the machine. Lots of versatility for sheet work. I first bought it for carriage side mouldings and wagon sides, but once you know it’s there, you can think of loads of trivial and ambitious uses for it. It can also use registration keys to cut print work and double sided, but I haven’t advanced that far yet.

Same idea but in the vertical plane. Every brick, quoin, lintel as per the original. (Italian decorative white bricks, English bond.

Invest in a Sihouette or Cricut cutter. Use the free download application to design your paving in as much detail as you want, including cracked and broken slabs, kerbstones, gulleys, tree grills, litter, etc., using the precise dimensions of where you are going to lay it, change your mind and alter it, cut a trial on plain card, try it out in place, (the card might be all you need, otherwise … ), cut onto 20 thou styrene, try it out in situ to double check, take it out (all one piece), paint and decorate it, and fix it down again permanently. I put something up a while ago for a simple van body that uses the same technique, but there’s a whole section on vinyl cutters here somewhere.

Found the label of the mystery stripper. It’s composed of 2-Propanol; Dimethyl carbinol CAS #67-63-0; 2-Butoxyethanol CAS #111-76-2.

This example did not respond to Dettol, but responded rapidly to a solution specifically intended for stripping plastic models. I can’t remember what the solution is called but it was on the model railway market maybe 30 years ago in the bottle in the picture, and I haven’t seen it around since. I’ve got the label somewhere so if it turns up, I’ll add it. The backstory here is that I bought the carriage second hand. It had been sprayed gloss lake (probably cellulose) and with a grey undercoat (probably etch primer). and the panelling lining had been attempted fairly coarsely in gold paint, probably Humbrol. I oversprayed it and tried over and over to re-line it but the combined effect of the thick-setting Humbrol gold metallic, and the unevenness of the previous attempt at lining made it impossible for me to get decent lines from my pen. The paint would flow off the pen line, helped by the fact that the honed pen broke the surface of the previous paint. That also spoiled the flow of the pen tip itself. So I gave up and tried to start stripping it using dettol. That didn’t touch the red cellulose, but I would have had to scratch away to clear the original gold paint. So I took out this aged bottle and got results in minutes. All good, but of course I now have a tedious job to remove every fleck of wrinkled old paint. I would have got the same result with cellulose thinners, but that would have damaged the internal plastic work.

I don’t know! I bought mine second hand and bought an extra, new auto blade, plus a sheaf of manually adjusting blades and a holder. At first I thought I needed the new blade, but once I got used to settings that worked, I went back to the old blade and I’m still using it, on card and styrene and also on outlines of large letters on white transfer film. That’s several dozen sheets of styrene plus numerous draft first cuts and mock-ups in cheapish card. I also turned a collet and a scribing pin to use to scribe faint laying-outs on sheet metal. You can set depth, speed, force and number of cuts, so lots of parameters, but it pays to be cautious, not ambitious or hasty.

Bold assumptions! Lots of Slaters floors are a touch too wide, and lots of otherwise masterful kits have a token rectangle of stripey embossed styrene in lieu of a floor. It’s going off topic, but one tool I’m continually finding new uses for and the ability to refine models with, is my vinyl cutter. I have a Silhouette Cameo, and Cricut ones are essentially the same. One of the simplest outputs from it is wagon floors with precise rectangular corners and dimensions, with correctly scored representations of the floor planking (whose joins would only be discernible from the fillet of dirt lodging there), and entirely repeatable at the press of a button. (And for the Woodham kit in my photos, the cutouts to step around the cast internal ironwork.). You can’t go thicker than 20 thou styrene without completing the cut by hand, but you can laminate two guaranteed identical floor pieces together if 20 thou is too thin. And there are hundreds of other things you can do with the machine that involve sheet work accurate to +/- 0.1mm. But that’s another topic.

The picture you show, Rob, illustrates another point to keep in mind. The kit shown in the Railway Hobby Shop tool, sits flat on the jig, upside down, whereas lots of rolling stock won’t have flat edges in any plane. The LBSCR wagon in my example has rounded ends (to support a wagon sheet and hopefully allow rain to run off - wonderfully optimistic, those Victorians). Likewise van ends. Straight ended open wagons often had side and especially end door hinges, and in later years had a protective metal strip stapled to the upper edge. And while the side rail, solebar and headstock might have had little to disrupt a smooth bottom edge, kit makers often include additional elements into the single casting, if not the whole axleguard assemblage. In my example the opposite applies, the solebars are entirely separate so the bottom rail is 12 inches above the flat datum. Likewise the surface detail interferes with squareness of the side plane and end plane, so geometrically solid faces on the jig, are not as helpful as one might suppose, compared with something tailored.

Yes of course you are right, The Johnster. And we should aim for the highest precision of which we are capable. Meanwhile Ive found a pair of jigs, these fit a Woodham Wagon Works LBSCR 4 plank open, among others, and I’ve set it up for the very same. The sides are pinned to the jig with pairs of magnets, and it stands on a sheet of glass, though only the end castings actually sit on the glass and they are not perfectly flat. I’ve deliberately put the loose end at an angle to stress its only role is to level the side. In shot as well are the corresponding inside jig and an engineer’s square, plus the kind of file that is very useful for getting flat, straight surfaces on kits, such as the edge of the solebar of the other side, posed accordingly.

Closer to a right-angle than many real wooden wagons and none-too-few steel ones then? ;-). (Or the walls of my Victorian house :-( ) Yes you are right of course, but the material is easy to work. A good quality medium sized flat fine file is also a very useful tool, and can straighten out that sort of deviation. I cut slots out to allow for e.g. moulded bolt heads and washer plates, and corner plates, and finish up with jigs that are specifically for a particular kit, but the angle extrusion is within the tolerances of most cast and moulded wagon kits. As a flat straightedge, it is invaluable. I couldn’t find my box of wagon jigs, but the pic shows it as a straightedge reference fence on my lining setup.

Another all-purpose item to have handy is a length of extruded aluminium angle from Wickes or similar, typically the 2cm by 2cm one, though the other ones might be handy sometimes. That gives you an internal and external right angle, it’s easy to cut to whatever length and shape you want, so it’s handy for making any number of jigs. It also comes in useful as a rightangle fence on your workbench which you can screw down and I’m about to use some on my coach lining jig to make a horizontal reference fence.

Good. Be inspired, not dismayed! Also Geoff Haynes’ book and Martin Welch’s too. Practice, practice and practice. Have half a dozen similar models in progress concurrently, so when you complete a stage on one, you can move on to the next, after a stretch and tea break. Get an Optivisor cheap copy for £20, to see more closely what’s going on. The most frustrating aspect of the process is when you go back to the first model in the batch and see how poor it is compared with your most recent one. You won’t be content until you strip it down and do it again. (Most of my current scruffy work arises from trying to over-paint and especially, re-line, on top of previous attempts.)

I had a look again at Ian Rathbone’s book (always inspiring anyway), and noted his rattle can advice is different, viz. he says get everything warm, including putting the tin in a jug of hand hot water before starting. He’s advising using the warmth to get the spray paint as runny as possible so that it spreads evenly. I was presuming that warmer air will cause the paint to dry quicker including in flight. If it does dry too much in flight it will cause orange peel. He notes that a cold room will have more moisture in the air supply which will spoil the finish. Anyway his book is… and he has been known to feature in certain exhibition events.

I suspect that depends on where you apply it. According to Wikipedia, it “is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage its recreational consumption.” As a non-imbiber, I am uncertain if the wiki description applies to the lavender coloured concoction only, or to the aura around the immobile inhabitants of my local high street late on Friday night. But I’d suggest that applying it to my train set is a recreational way of consuming it.

Yes I’m sure you are right. I did say, ‘PC’s Pressfix transfers are the same only with a water soluble coating instead of Shellac.’ and the instructions refer to it as gum. And when it *is* in the correct location, press firmly. I don’t recall any problems repositioning it before the water bath, the gum is not hypersensitive.

Peter Chatham’s Methfix range are (were) silk screen printed onto a shellac coated paper, and then finished with another layer of shellac, I believe. There’s no carrier film, when you press them into place, the meths will have softened the shellac varnish which will glue the design to the model surface. PC’s Pressfix transfers are the same only with a water soluble coating instead of Shellac. So, with no transfer / decal / décalcomanie carrier film, there’s nothing to soften, it’s actually pre-dried paint with some sticky varnish to weld it to the surface. Yes apply a suitable protective varnish over it to avoid scrapes and wear. Note for the same reason, once released from the backing paper, every letter in the design is a separate entity and will obey Newton’s laws of motion independently of the remaining letters (and possibly some other unknown dynamic principles as well), so use the initial tacky surface to get the letters in the right place before their dose of meths! Also make sure your protective varnish isn’t going to spoil the lettering, by applying an unwanted sample to a surface and testing with your chosen varnish and any thinners you might use. However the only genuine scrap on the sheet is probably just the tiny print registration crosses in the corners. PC himself didn’t make any suggestions for suitable protective varnish, and there are lots of solvents and things we use now that were not around 40-50 years ago. However I’ve not suffered any solvent-induced disasters with Methfix or Pressfix, whereas I often have with waterslide transfers.

It’s DR that has resorted to enamels, rest assured he is older (and thicker and less runnable too possibly) than his paint pots, whereas RCP aka OP, on demographic probabilities, is likely to be younger and more fluid than them.

Work in progress, but genuine Halfords red primer underneath. (Humbrol Railway Colours LMS red on top, yes the tin is 50+ years old.)

Halfords rattle can grey etch primer or red oxide. Keep paint tin in the room where you work. Not on a hot or humid day like today. Shake for as long as your arm and your family can tolerate. Practice on scrap. When it’s consistently consistent, start spraying offstage from your model and run along it quickly, to off stage at the other side, nonstop. 1 x 25cm coach length in 1-2 seconds. Spray about 20 to 30cm away. Repeat once only in the other direction. Stop there! If you need more coverage, let that dry hard first, and never more than 2 fast rattle can sprays at a time. Save the airbrush for the top coats. Other opinions may differ! And lungs first btw: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/385684936103?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=j6ffte2bqai&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=j4rmnIUNSH-&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Dettol is great for lifting enamels and gets the bulk of Triang-type baked on paint off. But having started, it’s a bit like landing a plane… the nearer the ground you are, the harder it gets. Spend happy hours chiselling out the little flecks that cling in the corners. I’ve hardly used acrylic so I’d like to learn what works best. I tried to strip a brass carriage with orange-peel/leatherette finish (enamel), with a Halfords acrylic primer, and although the top coat came up, the primer went sticky and I couldn’t recover the pristine metal surface. It still remains thus in my Woodhams Yard to-do stash.

Thank you for all your contributions. At this point I took the graphic I copied into my first post above, the low resolution one as here, (not the high res one that you can get at the link’s resolution at the Midland Railway Study Centre website), and edited the surrounding to be crimson lake (RHB #813640). I added a vague attempt at the raised upper left highlights ( they are rendered in the high res original, lost in the low res version), and came up with this: I used Word as the base document for printing on transfer paper, because scaling down in Paint removed critical definition which didn’t get lost so badly in the printed Word document . That gave me this sheet when printed: it includes the painted-on train description and the clerestory rendering of the 1897 train. I had already applied PC Pressfix transfers, but I laid out this version next, for comparison. There is no touching in of the edges (it is white transfer film, not clear), and no other prep or finishing here. It doesn’t look too bad, though the picture shows a missing moulding line I need to fix, as well as the scruffy line at floor level.

Hello John, thanks for joining the chat. Yes I use white film transfer paper for the toner density problem. I've also experimented a bit with lateral thinking - using a pale undercoat and clear film with the body colour on the film so that the transfer is a mask - works ok with some wagon sides if they have a large enough plain area, and gives a crisp edge without looking so much like a scaled-down vinyl stick-on as regular transfers do. But the underlying paint does show up under the body-colour transfer unless it is either pretty precise (defeats the object!) or fades in. Also using my Silhouette cutter (like Cricut) to cut the letter shape on white transfer paper - tricky and usually requires several attempts, and usually I cut into the backing paper too, though that isn't always a problem. These two methods only work with large block letters on wagons, though I've wondered about using the methods to represent other details, not just rolling stock lettering. I have armchair thoughts about rendering the extremely complex artwork of original Pullman cars in similar ways - the transfers would cover the whole lower carriage side, probably in separate segments per panel, or perhaps laid in one to get alignment, then sliced up at the moulding intervals.