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James Harrison

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Blog Entries posted by James Harrison

  1. James Harrison
    It has taken probably the better part of a week but the lining is now finished. All of it done by hand with paint pens. It won't stand close scrutiny however it does look convincing from a distance of a few feet away (like the rest of my models, really).
     
    I've found a source of transfers for the Great Central lettering and insignia however I'm going to have to wait until later this month to actually put an order in for some.
     
    So until then, I'm regarding this one as finished!
     

  2. James Harrison
    Back to the mogul for the final bits- lining and handrails are done!
     

     
    Having waited a week for parts so I could do the lining as a transfer, I got frustrated with the method after about half an hour, and lined it out by hand with a paint pen and ruler.
     
    On the other hand; my attempt at using fuse wire for the boiler handrail worked a treat. Unfortunately I found that the 15amp wire was too thick to fit through the handrail knobs, so had to use 5amp instead. This I think looks too thin and flimsy; next time I'll try to get hold of some 10amp or 13amp wire instead.
  3. James Harrison

    The D9, part 2

    By James Harrison,

    I've finally managed to get a few photographs of work so far.
     

     

     
     
     
    Work carried out so far consists of the following:
     
    1) All detail removed from the boiler and firebox.
     
    2) A 3mm slit was then filed into the boiler barrel right in front of the firebox.
     
    3) A 3mm fillet of a second 2P firebox was then inserted, and once the glue had set it was filled and sanded.
     
    4) Model filler was used to fill the holes left behind when the boiler fittings were removed.
     
    5) The running plate was sanded down flush with the cabsheets from the rear of the cab to the front steps.
     
    6) New cabsheets and splashers were cut from 0.4mm plastic sheet (this thickness has a nice slightly transparent finish, so I could trace directly off the Charles Reddy drawing).
     
    7) From my spare 2P body the cab front was removed, filed down and then inserted between the new cabsheets. This extended the cab by 6mm to the front.
     
    8 ) A piece of 0.4mm plastic sheet was gently curved between my fingers and then smothered in solvent and fixed down to the cab roof. Once the solvent had dried I held the model over a candle to further soften this piece and co-erce it to take up the curve of the cab roof. I then gave it another dousing with the solvent.
  4. James Harrison
    Considerably further on with the Gorton Mogul now...
     

     
    I've added a new smokebox saddle out of plastic sheet, and I then used the same material to extend the tender sheets up by 6mm to get closer to the Robinson design. New buffers have been added- cheking through my spares box I found a complete set of Robinson oval buffers which have now found their way onto the model.
     
    The only major bits left for the loco are footsteps and handrails- of which more anon pending experiments later this week- the focus is now shifting to the tender.
  5. James Harrison
    I don't like throwing money at my hobbies. There, I said it. To my mind there is always more satisfaction in building something that looks good and doesn't cost too much than there is in going to a store and opening my wallet.
     
    So, for once I've surprised myself and spent some 'proper' money on myself and bought a few little beauties from Ebay. None of them perfect (that is probably why I got them at such a bargain price), but they'll do me.
     
    First up we have a GCR 9F (LNER N5) 0-6-2 in GCR black.
     

     
    (Bleurgh. What is it with camera focus these days?) Not a bad little model, but the transfers let it down somewhat. Now you may be thinking 'James, you built an N5 a few years ago- why buy one?', but the thing is that whilst I was pleased with my hackbashed example when I built it, since then it has fallen down the ranks and now languishes somewhere on the 'really needs replacing' list- alongside the D6 that I was so proud of a few years ago.
     
    Next up is a GCR 9K (LNER C13) 4-4-2 in BR black.
     

     
    (That's better!) This was sold as being a scratchbuild effort (I wish my scratchbuilds were quite as good!) with a dodgy motor- it runs perfectly well backwards but not quite so well forwards. There are also one of two bits that look to be missing- eg the whistle. Now my plans with this one are to repaint it in LNER black and replace the motor and chassis. I'll be looking through my old Railway Modellers this afternoon for the Ian Beattie drawings of the C13 and C14, to compare the driving wheel sizes and spacings with the GWR 14xx, which strikes me as being perhaps the most likely candidate for a donor chassis.
     
    And so on to...
     

     
    ... GCR Class 1 (LNER B2) "City of London". I've wanted a B2 for years (see my previous blogpost) and I'm really pleased I won this loco. My original aim was to repaint it into LNER livery as "City of Lincoln" but I think the GCR dark green and claret livery suits the loco much better than apple green. I'll be reading John Quick's GCR liveries book today to see if "City of Lincoln" ever saw GCR green or whether it remained in black through to LNER ownership. It does need a bit of attention both structurally and in terms of paint finish (there is, for instance, no attempt at cab lining on the model).
     
    And finally, I've started work on my Gorton mogul neverwazza.
     

     
    Quite a handsome looking machine in W A Tuplin's "Great Central Steam". The first step to take was to measure up the 43xx boiler against the D11 spare I bought a few weeks ago. There was about 7mm discrepancy- the D11 being too long- however re-reading the book it says that the boiler was merely based upon that fitted to the Director's, rather than being a proper Director boiler. I felt therefore that the easiest solution to the problem would be the most appropriate, and carefully cut away the rear 6mm of the ex-Director's firebox. Now the next step will be cut away the 43xx boiler and running plate between the cab and the bufferbeam.
  6. James Harrison
    I first became interested in the GC thanks to one book and two photos in that aforementioned book.
     
    The book was JC Healy's "Echoes of the Great Central" and the two photos were, well, one was on the back cover and was Butler Henderson sitting at Rothley resplendent in GCR green and the other was Sir Sam Fay again in GCR livery at Annesley.
     
    To an impressionable 12-year-old mind there isn't much difference between a Sam Fay and a B12/3, and I'm sure you can well imagine the response of my parents when I told them I wanted to turn my (then brand spanking new) Hornby model into 'that engine in the photograph'.
     
    And so my wish to own a Sam Fay went unfulfilled. Fast forward 15 years and I've twice been right on the cusp of getting hold of one on Ebay, only to lose it in the last 5 seconds. I began to think if I wanted one, I'd have to build it myself from scratch, an endeavour I was put off from by my attempts to scratchbuild a Director- that dam' curved footplate being the very devil to form in plastic sheet.
     
    So you can perhaps understand my elation tonight at winning, for a very reasonable price, a built whitemetal kit example off of that well-known internet auction site (along with an N5).
     
    My plans for it, when it arrives, are, I don't know. If the current paint job pleases me I will most likely keep it in GCR livery as City of London- it will make a nice stablemate for my GC-liveried Butler Henderson. If, on the other hand, it needs a bit of TLC, I might repaint it into LNER livery as City of Lincoln (Lincoln being where I spent three very happy years as a student).
     
    Either way I'm ecstatic tonight.
  7. James Harrison
    Sometimes things don't quite go to plan.
     
    In this instance, the plan was to use a pair of 2P bodies to build a B5 'Fish' engine. Last time, I had gotten as far as hacking one body up and splicing in a length of boiler from the second, and beginning to look at welding the new boiler onto a running plate from a Patriot.
     
    Unfortunately what then happened was that it all went wrong. The new boiler was from plastic so thick that it didn't sit at proper height, and then the new running plate, having been carved up to suit the chassis and the drawings, proved too slight to be of much use. Eventually it reached the point of being hacked up so much as to be less effort to start over than it was to continue.
     
    So I made a fresh start. I used the firebox from the Patriot that had previously donated its running plate, and then I found a length of 19mm brass tube in my spares box. A few evenings' work with a mitre saw and a file got the tube down to size and appropriately cut up to fit the motor, and then I took a few pieces of 0.5mm plastic sheet and wrapped them onto it. I secured these with rubber bands and then immersed the lot in boiling water, quenching it under the cold tap.
     
    This thickened the boiler barrel up to 20mm, and I then bonded it onto the firebox.
     
    Onto the new running plate. This time I used a length of 0.5mm plastic sheet, cutting it very carefully to fit over the wheels and motor, and then I took a length of 2mm square plastic section and bonded this to it to firm the whole thing up. I then took the amputated front 'lowered section' of the Patriot plates and bonded it to my new scratchbuilt upper running plate.
     
    The boiler was then lowered onto the running plate, and the smokebox saddle built up to keep the whole thing level.
     
    Onto the splashers. I cut these from more 0.5mm sheet. The offcuts from this particular component were then glued to the boiler to remove the gap between running plate and boiler. Yes, I know technically there should be a gap but on the other hand if I left it there all we would see would be the motor and the cutout of the boiler would be more pronounced. Swings and roundabouts- it's not ideal but better than the alternative.
     
    Anyway, a few photos of progress up to last night- typically since then I've added more to the model, in the shape of the cab sheets.
     

     

  8. James Harrison

    Neverwazzas....

    By James Harrison,

    Since my last update, finally getting a decent result for a Robinson matchboard carriage, I've been quite busy. The intention is to rebuild all four of my matchboard carriages in one go, and so far I've completed two and got a third roughly half-way finished.
     
    Yesterday progress on these came to a halt when the postman delivered a copy of W.A. Tuplin's 'Great Central Steam'. A quick flick through brought me to the obligatory centre pages of illustrations, complete with line drawings of locos considered but never built.
     
    Now the 'Super Sam Fay' and the 'Super Director' left me feeling quite ill. To my eye the fine lines of the original builds would have been comprehensively ruined if rebuilt with longer, larger, 200psi boilers and more substantial frames. What really got my attention and excited me was the proposed but never built Gorton mogul. 5'8'' drivers with a coupled wheelbase 7'6'' + 8'6'' paired up with the boiler from a Director.
     
    Now then, who has ever made a model 5'8'' wheeled mogul.... ah, yes, Mainline made one. Does it match? No, not quite.... the 43xx wheelbase is 7'0'' + 7'9''....
     
    So, 7mm out at 4mm scale. Still, as it was never built who is to say it would be wrong?
     
    And of course, to build this would set a precedent to build the neverwazza early 1920s Robinson pacific....
  9. James Harrison

    Matchboard redux

    By James Harrison,

    With my latest attempts at creating GC-esque carriage stock from RTR and Ratio offerings producing results, my first tries (a rake of matchboarded 1911 mainline carriages) started to look a bit tatty. In addition, since first creating them new information has come to light, suggesting I made the matchboarding too heavy in appearance and got the teak wrong- I went for a generally lighter hue, whilst photographs and paintings seem to suggest the matchboarding should be nigh-on invisible and the hue should be much darker.
     
    So I went and had a bit of an experiment earlier this week on one of them.
     
    The first thing to do was to remove my original paper overlays, which was done using a saucer of water, a stiff brush and a decent scalpel. I tried to save the transfers- of which more anon- and after an hour or so of patient cutting, scratching and scraping I managed to get the carriage body back to its original state, or something approaching it.
     
    I then took some white putty and smeared it along the cantrail strip and below the waist of the carriage. Once it had gone off I sanded it down. At this point I used a sharp scalpel blade to carve the doors back into the carriage body.
     
    I then took a very dark brown enamel and wetted it down using white spirit, and gave the carriage body three coats of this. It came out looking as though it had been hit by a train of cocoa powder...
     
    I then took a lighter brown enamel and very sparingly worked my way over the body, two or three body panels at a time. This is almost drybrushed on, what I actually did was to put a nice even coat on and then wipe it away with a piece of rag. The result is that in some areas it sticks, others it is removed entirely and in between you get a nice effect of sheen. I then worked in just a suggestion of matchboarding by varying the direction of the brush strokes.
     
    At this stage I attempted to salvage the old transfers, by wetting the old paper overlays and worrying at them with a scalpel and brush. It didn't work. The paper disintegrated to the point that the only thing holding it together was the transfer, which then itself disintegrated... Ahh...
     
    There was only one thing to do and that was to competely replace the transfers. I think I might just have barely enough on the two sheets of HMRS LNER gold insignia in my spares box to do all four carriages. If not, well, I placed an order for another sheet last night.
     
    The carriage was then varnished in my own fashion using watered-down PVA glue.
     
    The final step was to try to make the matchboarding just a bit more obvious. I didn't want to scratch into the carriage body again and it struck me that what in essence you're looking for is just a simple dark line from the waist down to the solebar. As it turns out, a ballpoint pen will do this perfectly!
     
    So there we have it, at the third iteration. An easy and fairly quick way of getting GC-esque matchboard stock from Mainline/ Bachmann LMS 57' carriages.
     

  10. James Harrison
    My model 'Lord Faringdon' arrived last Saturday and although I don't anticipate doing any major work to it for at least a year, I have made a start of sorts in that I've replaced the bogie, driving wheels and removed the huge coarse motion brackets....
     

     
    It already looks much improved, but clearly there is a lot of work to do! I'm currently pondering how I can lower the body on the chassis without doing too much of a hack-job on either body or chassis.
  11. James Harrison
    There were three ex-GC 4-6-0s on Ebay this evening and I came away with one of them.
     
    The other two were a B6 and a 'Sam Fay' (which I was also bidding on but lost in the last 5 seconds )
     
    Anyway, I ended up with a B3 or 'Lord Faringdon' class.
     

     
    There are a few things with it that are suspect and I'm sure I can improve. I'm considering giving it a new chassis, new cab sides and a new paint job at the very least, and at the end of it I'l have a nice and certainly unusual addition to the loco stud. But I doubt I'll get around to it before the end of next year....
  12. James Harrison
    My conversion of a Hornby Railroad 'Flying Scotsman' to classmate 'Centenary' is now good-as finished, so it's time for a couple of photos...
     

     

     
     
    I'm surprised how well even the cheaper Hornby offering scrubs up with just a little work. Most of alteration of course concerned the tender, which needed an entire new body (which could only be sourced in a dark navy blue clour and thus needed repainting). The coal rails I eventually added by folding some brass wire to shape, and then gluing onto plastic sheet backing pieces. I'm not entirely happy with this dodge but wit a bit of judicious weathering I can imagine it'll blend in.
     
    On the loco itself the existing lining (that would be....none, then) was covered over with HMRS pressfix lining. This works particularly well on the boiler bands and sets the cab off nicely. I had to repaint the entire loco to match with the tender. Not an entirely perfect job I admit but in this instance it works well because it gives the whole engine the slightly careworn appearance it would rapidly gain in service.
     
    For a weeks' evenings' worth of work I'm very happy with this- and next year I'll be doing a similar job on a Railroad 'Falcon'.
  13. James Harrison
    A bit of a query...
     
    ... my period of interest is the mid 1920's. Early days of the LNER and when the liveries were probably most interesting. Most of my builds so far (well, of them) are of locos toward the end of this era, 1927/28-ish when the livery had standardised (that is, when pretty much all of the pregrouping engines had been repainted). But I'd like to do at least one model 'the other way'- very early days (1923/24-ish).
     
    So; the last D9 was repainted into LNER apple green in 1926 (as pointed out in a photograph in Steve Banks' new book about LNER expresses). So what would it have worn before then? Full-bore Great Central livery with 'Great Central' on the tendersides and the GC crest on tender and splashers? GC Brunswick green with 'L & N E R' on the tender and a brass oval numberplate? Or something else entirely?
     
    I'd particularly like to know if the LNER insignia (in any form) was applied to pre-group locos wthout the effort being made to compltely repaint the loco into full LNER livery, as this could provide a nice 'bridge' between my 1922-accurate Butler Henderson and my 1927/28-accurate hackbashes and builds...
  15. James Harrison
    Herein we start to see why this blog is titled "The GC and Met in OO"...
     
    ... Because I've started my next loco build, and it's a red (well, chocolate brown) one....
     
    It's a Radley resin kit for a Metrovick Bo-Bo which I am planning to build pretty much straight out of the box. Sorry, no, got mixed up there- I never do that
     
    I want to see what can be done with this fairly basic kit to improve it.... I know the panelling is overstated by miles but my efforts at removing panel lines on carriages are poor to very poor, so I' not about to start sanding the body down to correct a fault that personally I have no proble with. No, my efforts are directed more at the 'being able to see right the way through the engine room from fore to aft and port to starboard' issue. I'm going to have a go at building an (admittedly fairly rudimentary) interior for the model.
     
    No work on that yet but last night I did manage to wash off and clean up the main parts- which were fairly clean castings anyway.
     

     

  16. James Harrison
    I thought progress was going too well with my Met electric, and then everything started to go wrong....
     
    It turned out I'd managed, somehow, to get even the basic colour wrong! What looks like choclate brown in some photos looks deep red or even almost purple in others.... researching (which I should have done before I started painting) I found that the colour is actually a very deep red. Out with the brushes again
     
    It was a simple job to rectify.... I broke out some burgundy paint and gave it a very thin wash over the body, removing most of the paint before it had a chance to dry. The result is a finish that like the prototype looks a very deep brown in some lights and a very deep red in others.
     
    I managed to fit the interior in much the fashion as I described last week. It's basic in the extreme but looks convincing enough when glimpsed inside.
     

     
    I found that the glazing supplied with the kit didn't fit very well. The window mouldings were very deep, whilst there was only about .25mm actually bearing onto the body... practically nothing to form a good strong joint. I kept the angled windows for the cab ends as they did fit pretty well, but replaced the others with some glue 'n' glaze.
     
    Now I'm working on fitting the handrails, which is proving quite a long and tricky task. I can only do one or two rails a night without taxing my patience....
     

  17. James Harrison
    With the exterior now largely painted, save for the roof, thoughts are beginning to turn toward how exactly to represent the interior of my Metropolitan electric locomotive.
     
    One of them, of course, was exhibited in 1924 with the side panelling removed at the British Empire Exhibition (photo from the London Transport Museum):
     

     
    Now what I think this shows is one large block for the motor with lots of wire and ancillary equipment along the sides. Unfortunately we can't replicate this exactly because where this block is, on the model at least, is a strip of whitemetal casting that glues into the resin body as part of the body-chassis fixing.
     
    Not that this matters too much, as there are only four tiny windows in the body sides where you would see anything. Which line up with fingerholes through the aforementioned cast strip.
     
    My first thought was to build a false floor above the whitemetal strip, and have maybe half of the motor block modelled. Unfortunately this false floor would be right below the level of the windows, if not actually going across them.
     
    This complicates matters because it means that the possibility of a one-piece interior model has been thrown out the window. It means now that each piece of the interior has to sit on its own base. The answer to that of course is to model the interior only where it can be seen, and to build it right onto the chassis. So if I line up this casting on the chassis, and then build my interior to line through the holes in it, I end up admittedly with only half an interior but the crucial areas where it will be seen are covered.
     
    So I'm thinking now of having two large, roughly detailed 'blocks' sitting in the middle of the chassis to suggest the motor and equipment, and then having bulkheads to suggest the back of the cabs. The whitemetal block would have to be painted black obviously, so as not to stand out in the gloom and to hide the fact that the passage through the loco is blocked at roughy waist-height by a long lump of metal....
     
    That just leaves the cabs to sort out, which in photos I have seen look like a cats cradle of wires and equipment. Now obviously not much of that will actually be visible, so it just needs a couple of the more obvious blocks to be modelled. These would be, probably, a couple of cabinets on the cab bulkhead, the driver's chair and controls and a few random 'gubbins' dotted around the cabsides.
     
    It could all be built out of offcuts of balsawood and plastic sheet in an afternoon. It looks then like my next modelling session is planned out....
  18. James Harrison
    The state of play of my Radleys Met Bo-Bo this morning. Frames were sprayed with Revell 'Ferrari Red', body was brush painted in Revell 'Chocolate Brown' as a precursor to spraying in the same colour (which, all being well, I'll do this afternoon). Internally it has a rough coat of matt black and a rough coat of mid-green. Im not too concerned about the finish in here as it won't be visible when the model is finished....
     

     

  19. James Harrison
    Well, finished for a given value of finished! There are of course a few little jobs to do as and when I 'get around to it' but the model is at the point where I could think 'enough' and it wouldn't look incomplete.
     

     

     
    I think this is my best model to date.
  20. James Harrison
    Thoroughly tired of laboriously hand-painting my models, and then finding a streaky finish and brush hairs on the completed model, I decided to have a go at airbrushing.
     
    I found a very cheap airbrush on ebay- now I know some argue to only buy the best but I've been burnt before spending lots of money of something that turns out to be a disappointment. So I bought a cheaper brush-if all goes well then no doubt eventually I'l work my way up to more expensive equipment. I've been given a compressor and I've ordered a water trap, but for my first attempt I used a can of compressed gas.
     
    At first I put just a few brushfuls of paint into the glass jar thinned roughly 50/50 with white spirit. Then I wondered why it kept running out.... eventually I just put about half of a Humbrol tin into the jar, thinned it and went for it. First lesson learnt- put as much in the jar as you can!
     
    This is what I ended up with...
     

     

     
    A much better result I feel. The only problem is that at the moment I've got to keep my airbrush attached to the can of propellant- the regulator on the can can't/ won't screw down completely to stop the gas escaping and relies upon the regulator on the brush to keep pressure. Not ideal.
  21. James Harrison
    New purchase!- found this on ebay this evening....
     

     
    It's described as a scratchbuilt LNER tank locomotive- it looks to be either an F1 or F2. Both classes built by the GCR in the 19th century to operate suburban trains around Manchester. My plans for it? The driving wheels look too small- I may look into replacing them with some 5' 7'' drivers. The chimney is a 1930s LNER standard flowerpot design, and will be replaced with a Robinson example. The loco will be given a clean up and a repaint and eventually put to work alongside my N5 on suburban trains.
  22. James Harrison
    Well, what do you think?
     

     
    Still masses to do obviously but to my mind it does now start to look like a B5 rather than a generic loco.
     
    I've paired it up with a Triang L1/ 2P tender, which I'm going to hack up in the same fashion I did an identical Airfix tender for one of my J11s.
     
    On the loco itself I've added a spectacle plate in slivers of plastic sheet- not quite finished yet- and I removed the cab roof, straightened it out a little and then re-instated it. It looks a lot better for this operation.
  23. James Harrison
    I've been trying to work on my B5 for the last few days. Nothing is ever easy....
     
    Having finally succeeded with the coupled wheels.... getting me this far
     

     
    I turned attention to the valvegear and bogie. Ah. Oh buggar.
     
    The bogie needs to be drawn in toward the coupled wheels by a good 8mm or so. Unfortunately I couldn't pull the link bar in to this degree (I managed it on the C5 only by cutting it and drilling a new hole, which managed to wreck one of my dremel drills), so I took it off entirely. I drilled the hole through the cylinder block necessary to fit it, and then began to think. A-ha! Parts of a 2P in the spares box- I found a screw just the right size and a spring. I turned the B12 bogie upside down and sat the spring in the circular hole in the bottom of it. I then slid the screw through the bogie, screwed the cylinder block onto it, and then screwed that onto the little metal lip on the B12 chassis, getting me this far
     

     
    Problem is that I now find that the clearances are too tight for it to go on anything but the very gentlest of curves! Thinking back to the C5 I remember now having to file down the inside faces of the cylinders and the bottom of the chassis block. Wish I'd remembered that before putting it all together....
  24. James Harrison
    When I last spoke about my L1 there were really only one or two bits left to work up on it.
     
    Well I'm very pleased to say that it is now finished!- another loco out of the shops and ready for the planned layout.
     

     

     

     

     
    I began by firmly attaching the front footplate footsteps. Previously these had been glued into position, but they kept coming adrift. Something a bit more permanent was required. I drilled 0.8mm holes very carefully into the underside of the running plate to a depth of about 2mm, then UHU'd some lengths of brass wire into the holes. I smeared UHU over the rear face of the footstep castings, then pressed them onto the wire. Result? Much firmer fittings.
     
    The coal bunker I managed to build up by simply taking a piece of paper, measuring the hole through the bottom of the bunker and transcribing that to the paper (with a little extra to the front and rear to form fixing tabs) and painting the resultant rectangle matt black. Once it had dried I cut it out, folded it up and glued it into the bunker with UHU. Left overnight to set I was then able to fill it with coal this morning.
     
    Nothing looks more like coal than coal, in my opinion. Living as I do on top of about five old coal pits it was a simple matter (at least, it was last Spring- might be a bit difficult right now!) to find a decent lump of the stuff sticking out the ground on the fields behind my house. Wrapped up in a plastic bag and then worked over with a hammer, you end up with a load of bits. Some are too large and really need smashing up further, others are okay to build up a foundation and still others are tiny shards or dust which can be placed on top.
     
    So I started by filling the bunker up to a decent height with some large-ish bits and then filled in the gaps with the smaller shards and dust. I then set it in-place using very dilute PVA glue delicately poured over it.
     
    Before I did this however I applied the transfers. I use HMRS pressfix transfers but in a slight twist I remove the backing paper before applying them by soaking them in water, This has an additional beneficial effect in that it removes most of the decal adhesive, meaning when I lay it on the model I can move the decal around using fine tweezers and a paintbrush until I am happy with the location. I then firmly dab the decal onto the model with a sheet of tissue paper, removing the excess water whilst temporarily fixing the decal in place. Once I have all of the decals on I give the model a coat of very dilute PVA glue. This sounds mad but it does a very good job of fixing the decals down fully, sealing them in and it dries to a matt finish to boot. It has to be dilute though- you can't get nearly as thin a coat as you need with the stuff as it comes, as a thick gloopy liquid from the DIY shops.
     
    Once the PVA had dried I gave the model a subtle dusting down with artists' chalks (in brown, grey and black tones) to suggest weathering.
     
    And there we have it, an unusual prototype ready to roll, available for a reasonable price and capable of being built to a good standard straight out of the box and to a better one with just of modicum of thought and tweaking.
     
    Would I build another? Absolutely.
  25. James Harrison
    The last week or so I've been trying to get my D11 into apple green. It eventually took two base coats of Revell 'Leaf Green'- a horrible bile green colour- and then three coats of Humbrol 'Apple Green' acrylic on top. The result of using these two colours is that the final finish has quite a pleasing depth to it.
     

     

     
    I'm also trying a bit of an experiment on the model. When I first started lining out my models I bought an 'easi-liner' tool. It is basically a caligraphy pen with a nin that has a tiny reservoir. The idea is that you charge the reservoir with paint and then use it like a pen. Unfortunately my early efforts with it used matt paint, and it kept clogging up. Eventually I turned to transfers and gave up on it.
     
    The problem is with transfers that I simply cannot get the cab lining right. So I'm having a go at some hybrid lining.... the boiler bands and tender panels will be transfers, whilst the cab lining will be gloss paint applied through the 'easi-liner'. So far I've managed to get a couple of nice neat evenly applied lines. I just need to find my gloss black to finish the cab panels once the white has dried. I've used the same tool for the brass beading on the splashers, though in this instance the paint was possibly too thin and has run. Something to clean up there I think.
     
    The really nice thing of course is that with lining starting to go on I can see the finish line coming up with this model...
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