D869

Good suggestions... I'll investigate the 45 degree cutter option (picture framing?) but fear that might mean a trip to the dreaded H*bbycr*ft... dreaded since they dropped most of their modelling stock in favour of knitting, sticking glittery things to other things and other such pursuits (struggling to avoid straying into gender stereotyping here, but I think it's safe to say that they have re-prioritised their target demographic)

It is indeed, but I generally find that things are more convincing if they are based on reality - making stuff up often results in things that would never really happen. (in the style of the Churchill dog...) Err... noooo. In the dim and distant past when I made card buildings and didn't know any better I used to be quite happy to overlook the bare edge of the card at the corners of the building. Then I read how Pendon did in in Model Railway Constructor and I decided that I needed to do better. I'm sure that there are other ways to avoid having bare edges, but the finish on this building doesn't offer many ways to hide the joins. It still might go pear shaped, in which case it will be rethink time. That's my take based on very little experience, but you're the buildings expert. How would you do it?

A quick pic of (early!) work in progress on the next building that I owe to St Ruth, along with a rough mock-up. The plan is to try to follow the 'Pendon cottage' style of construction (well, sort of) - the key point being to cut the external walls from a single piece of card (0.7mm in this case) to avoid any joins. External corners will be formed (I hope) by creating a 'V' cut behind the corner and removing most of the thickness of the card... well, it worked for a PW hut but this is a bit bigger. Here's a photo the real thing taken in 2006. It is not a hotel now - it has been converted into flats. I have a number of photos showing the hotel in earlier times but they all share a common problem - they are taken from the level of the railway, so the retaining wall hides most of the ground floor. Right now I have no idea what the ground floor looked like when the building was a hotel. I do know that there were a lot of changes in this area - for example 1970s photos show a glazed sun deck (now removed) at first floor level over the entrance area but 1940s photos prove that this was a later addition. Unless I can get better information I will need to assume that the conversion to flats has basically restored the original appearance of the ground floor. This is certainly partly true, but I doubt whether the truth is quite so simple. Any help would be appreciated. Ironically, I was stood opposite the hotel in the early 1980s and took a couple of photos, but my camera was pointed towards the trains and of course I took zero notice of the buildings behind me.

Pete, maybe a very basic question, but do you intend to operate from the back or the front (or maybe both) ?

Another thought just occurred to me - if you look at the closeup photo and compare the black line at waist level with the cantrail line you probably wouldn't guess that they were done with the same nib in the pen but that's exactly how they were done. The black line is on top of gloss yellow whereas the cantrail line is on top of my rather rough maroon coat, so it just goes to show how critical the smoothness of the underlying paint finish really is.

Thanks for the comments. It's an Ultima etched kit - the first one of these that I've built. Having also built Fleetline and MTK kits in the past (which are now BHE), I'd say that I prefer the Ultima ones although both present challenges with joining dissimilar materials. You can still read parts 1 and 2 if you like, for example... http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/blog/722-hydraulic-heaven/page__tag__coaches I will certainly be using the pen again on future maroon liveried coaching stock projects and green diesels that need lining. While my results are probably not as good as a really good lining transfer, I found the process enjoyable and the results very satisfying (and honestly, Pete it doesn't need nerves of steel). After having made the investment of buying the pen, it's also cheaper and I don't need to worry about sourcing transfers - I can just get on with finishing the model. I'm hoping that the results (especially the cantrail line) will improve with practice. I think that one of the keys to success is the smoothness of the finish that you are lining over and I definitely have room for improvement there - more practice with the airbrush needed.

The full brake has now been handed over to the operating department. The painting sent somewhat less than smoothly (this is normal for me). A coat of Halfords primer from a can was followed by an airbrushed coat of precision maroon. This went on very well and I was very happy with the nice smooth satin finish... except... there were a couple of bits of dust that embedded themselves into the finish in quite a prominent place. I thought the best option would be to remove the offending bits of dust and rub the relevant area down smooth followed by a further thin coat, so that's what I did. This didn't go well - I think that I over thinned the second coat so the emulsion broke down a bit and the resulting finish was very flat indeed - nowhere near as good as the first coat. I decided to press on and hope that a final varnish coat would sort everything out. The underframe and ends were brush painted with a suitably mucky mix of brown and black. Some of this strayed onto the sides and was cleaned off with thinners but still left some residue, probably because of the flatness of the finish. The lining was done with the Bob Moore pen. While my results are not as neat as commercial lining, they turned out better than I had hoped - particularly the waist line which was done with the thick nib to put down a broad light yellow line (this looked awful on its own!) followed by the thinnest nib to draw a black line down the middle. One drawback of this method is that it is not for the impatient. The actual lining is quite quick to do, but there is a lot of waiting for the paint to harden. In this case, the lining took four sessions - one for each colour per side. I'm very unsure about the maroon colour. I'm pretty sure that Precision have done their homework and matched the spec of BR maroon, but comparing it to mid 1960s photos, the real thing appears to be noticeably lighter and redder. This may be a problem related to 1960s film but I don't think so. Some 60s photos show several coaches and demonstrate that there was significant variation in the real thing, perhaps due to fading. Photos of maroon Warships in later years show some quite ugly effects from patch repainting. In future I might lighten the shade by mixing in another colour. The lettering was done with resurrected Woodhead transfers applied with Microscale Micro Set. While doing the guard's door I also painted one other door with Micro Set to see what effect it had on the finish when dry. You can just tell that this story isn't going to end well... Some of the transfer film edges were showing a bit too much so these were tamed with Micro Sol. Finally the underframe and ends were masked and the sides given a spray coat of varnish. Having had bad results with Humbrol matt varnish I tried Tamiya gloss on this occasion. For the most part, I was quite happy with the resulting finish, except... I noticed a really strange effect where the Micro Set had been. Some light coloured flecks had somehow managed to form where the Micro Set had been used. This was worst on the door that I had unnecessarily painted with Micro Set. I can only assume that this is some sort of reaction between the varnish and the residue from the Micro Set but I've never heard of it before and it was a complete (and unwelcome) surprise. I wondered whether it might be the Micro Sol solvent, but the worst problem was in a place that hadn't been touched with Micro Sol. You can see the problem in the photo below. After some pondering I decided that the best course was to scrape off as much of the light flecks as possible and use a fine brush to retouch the problem areas with maroon. Fortunately this worked and the areas are small enough not to be too noticeable. It's still pretty annoying because I like both Micro Set and the Tamiya varnish... but it seems that they don't like each other. So there you have it - another tail of woe from my paint shop. I made up a simple interior from thin card. This consisted of a floor (to hide any remaining bare brass), the corridor partition and the guard's compartment. Most of it can be fitted easily when the roof is taken off but the full length corridor partition needs to be slotted in through the end of the coach (with the gangway removed). All of the interior was painted brown using watercolours. I don't know whether my shade is correct, but it's all removable in case better information arrives one day. Since this vehicle is likely to run with RTR 'N' gauge coaches I found it necessary to mess with the ride height a bit by adding an extra washer to the bogie pivots. This means that the gap between bogie and solebar is too big but the upside is that the cantrail height is then a fair match for the new Farish Mark 1s. Unfortunately even this compromise doesn't make it a good match for Dapol Colletts, even after fitting them with wheels that are 1mm smaller than they should be. The big advantage of this dodge is that it is very easily reversible. The model is probably a tad too shiny to fit in with the rest of my fleet but at the moment I am quite enjoying looking at it this way. When the novelty wears off then I will probably apply some further light weathering to the sides and roof but I'm not in any hurry so this job might wait until the BG has some more friends to play with - some more Ultima Hawksworths seem to have found their way into my gloat box recently.

You finally worked out what it's for then?

That reminds me... I must write some words about South Yard some time... my solution is... make it so small that you don't need joins... actually I don't claim any originality on that one (or anything else for that matter).

Thanks for the comments. Will: the tide always seems to be high when I'm in Penzance but photos show that it does go out quite a long way. We're not keen to try modelling the sea, so the tide will definitely be out.

Hi Pete, Good to see this again. I'd be interested to know a bit more about your setup time issues and your board joint arrangement since someone I know (not me!) is contemplating doing something similar. I haven't quite got the hang of the new look RMWeb - some things that used to work with content blocks now behave a little strangely. It also used to tell me when you posted something but it seems to be a bit hit and miss with that too.

This photo was taken at our most recent meeting. The idea was to provide a progress update... the snag is that none of the completed buildings were in place when it was taken, so much of the progress isn't visible. Oh well... maybe the idea was more of an 'action shot' to show work going on painting the rocky beach in the foreground. There is further geological work happening out of sight at the far end plus some work on boundary walls along the road side. One group member seems to be more attracted to the sponge cake though...

Thanks Jerry. We obviously missed an opportunity at the Oxford Expo to extend the quay line on St Ruth to link up with your layout. Maybe next time. Having said that, although class 22s did appear on the S&D (yet another of my pet interests), it didn't exactly take place in happy times for the line. Regards, Andy

So you can't see the lines that I scribed to represent the extra hinges then? Actually... neither can I but I did scribe them. Oh well.

Thanks folks for the comments. Projects currently on the go or being thought about are (as usual...) (too) many. They include the Hawksworth full brake which is currently awaiting tidy up of some bits of its paint job. The gloat box was extensively re-stocked a few weeks back with some more Hawksworths and a couple of 2mm Association CCTs. Longer term you may have seen a thread on the forums about Hayle related freight traffic, so that might result in me actually building something one day. I have a Maunsell 'P' set on order from Chris Higgs and an option on a damaged Ivatt 2MT body that could one day find itself on a Nigel Hunt chassis in front of said 'P' set. Then I am still progressing (slowly) on a biggish building for St Ruth, about which I will say more when there is something to show. I'm also in the process of re-wheeling a bunch of Farish coaches to partially alleviate the previous shortage of rolling stock at St Ruth.

D6309 is pretty much finished now and is ready to earn its keep on South Yard and St Ruth. It even went on holiday (with South Yard) to its native Cornwall a couple of weeks ago. The trip through the paint shop was fairly long and painful, the lowest point being when I sprayed it with Humbrol matt varnish to protect the transfers only to find that this left a horrid translucent effect over the whole loco. I rescued this with an wash of thinned Precison green applied by brush. Thankfully this worked, otherwise it would have been time for the paint stripper. The lining was done with the Bob Moore pen. This went very smoothly and only needed a bit of tidying up to make the ends nice and crisp. The transfers are old Woodhead ones that I have had for many years. These were resurrected using Microscale liquid decal film thanks to a tip on RMWeb. Weathering was all done by brush - I am not yet confident enough to do this with the airbrush (certainly not on something that has taken so long to reach this stage). The effect I was looking for was to reproduce the very run down condition of these locos (especially the remaining green ones) circa 1969. I think I achieved what I wanted to do (they were really grotty), but after doing it I wasn't quite so sure that I wanted it any more. The glazing is 10 thou clear sheet glued behind the body sides using Formula 560 Canopy glue. I would have liked to do true flush glazing for the windscreens. I tried to do it but found that I couldn't persuade 10 thou glazing to stay put in a hole in a 10 thou metal loco body. The headcodes are done using some letters that I had specially produced for me by a local printing company a long time ago. They were photographed from my hand drawn artwork onto some sort of special printing film (not normal photographic film - I tried that unsuccessfully) so that when fixed into place the headcodes appear to be behind glass. I suspect that this way of doing things has probably been superseded by computerised printing so it may not be possible to do this again. There are still a few bits and bobs remaining - the cab door handrails are the main exterior items. I'm also going to try to fit a bit of cab detail if this can be done without it looking silly. There are still a few places on where too much daylight is visible through the side windows and louvres so I need to add a few more bits of black plastikard to block this. I'd also like to make the wheel flanges less shiny if this can be done without compromising the running, but I'm not sure how to do this. One day I might reinstate the lights to illuminate the headcodes from behind. I'd also really like to get a sound system working but I think that this would need to be under the baseboard both in terms of practicality and sound quality. So far I haven't found a good under baseboard system that can be set up with sounds to represent different loco types. I think it's quite a small niche market, so maybe it's too big an ask. Overall I am very happy with the end result. The loco (to me anyway) looks the part and moves very well indeed thanks to its Atlas running gear. I might even build another one... but not just yet. Here are a couple more photos...

Thanks all for the comments. Request for more info on the gangways noted. I'll see what I can do (and I'll also see if I can get any decent photos of small objects made almost entirely from black plastikard) Regards, Andy

The full brake is ready for the paint shop, all bar a few bits of fettling. I don't intend to write a blow by blow account here - after all the kit comes with instructions, so I'll stick to the main places where I have gone 'off piste'. Unlike David 71's build, I opted for using solder for all of the brass to brass joints. I stuck to cored electrical solder plus Carrs Green Label flux because I find this stronger and less messy than using lower melting point solder pastes. Footboards were added to the solebars using nickel silver strip. This was done with the chassis upside down using thin card to get a consistent level to the footboards. This helped with the next bit too... The biggest departure from the instuctions was in the assembly of the main body. I chose to solder the coach sides to the vertical parts of the floor etch. I was a little wary about this but it worked out really well. To get the alignment right, I pushed the thin card mentioned above back into the gap above the footboards. This gave me a nice datum to align the bottom of the sides while soldering, so I only needed to worry about getting them aligned at the ends. This method of assembly allowed me to really work on the fit of the roof and ends because these could be held in place by a little inward spring of the sides. It also meant that I could see the fully assembled coach quite early in construction, which really helps with the motivation. I added three cross members towards the top of the sides for strength - but leaving enough room for the roof section to fit between the sides. I found that there was a gap between the top of the ends and the roof so I added a 10 thou plastikard strip to the top of the ends. Once this was fully set I tidied up the profile to achieve a good fit. The kit comes with cast whitemetal corridor connections. These are OK but I prefer to make my own from black plastikard. These are sprung outwards and can be pulled back and held in place with a clip behind the end when not in use. The photo below shows the inside of the coach with one of the gangways dismantled. The kit provides two etched truss rods and 'V' hangers, but the prototype photos show four truss rods. The 'V' hangers should also be in pairs. Ultima sell these etches separately but I didn't have one. I noticed that the edge of the fret was very similar in thickness to the truss rods, so I cut this out carefully and soldered up a couple of inner truss rods using the etches as a template and some 2mm scale rail as the stiffening piece that is soldered to the floor. I also added the extra footsteps for the guard's door from some bits of nickel silver strip. The roof is removable. It is a reasonable push fit but is also held in place by small rare earth magnets glued to the cross members. Some small pieces of steel (cut from packing crate bands) are stuck (err... with blu tack) inside the roof moulding to give the magnets something to grab hold of. This is the first time I've tried this and it seems to work well. I was a bit concerned that the magnets might affect the DG couplings or be attracted by the uncoupling magnets but they seem to be far enough away to prevent any problems. The bogies are from the 2mm Association shop - fold up jobs in nickel silver. These are attached using the mounts that come with the bogies (i.e. not the Ultima ones) plus a captive nut attached to the coach floor. Interior detail will probably be very minimal because the windows on this vehicle are very small and I have no clue whether the internal corridor sides were solid or mesh screens. I will probably just fit a couple of plastikard partitions at each end of the guard's compartment to stop daylight being visible in the wrong places. I couldn't find any buffers that looked much like the square shank GWR coach buffers. On a previous model (a Siphon G) I modified some whitemetal 2mm Association coach buffers but these are not available now. Sorting through my bits box I selected a pack of TPM turned brass Oleo buffers that seemed to be about the right length and diameter. Each of these was mounted in the pin chuck and the shank filed as close to a square section as I could get. The end result looks reasonable provided that you don't look too closely. Painting will be in maroon. I've been practicing with the Bob Moore lining pen and can now produce a reasonable set of lines for maroon livery - at least on a small test piece. Time will tell if I can repeat that on a 64 foot coach.

Good idea! How about "Missys Modelling Mobile" or similar!! As for travelling with a hubby I will need to get a hubby first! ... and presumably a respray into chocolate and cream plus GWR inspired interior design too?

I hope so. BTW, I have recently improved the running of my (early) Dapol class 66 by hard-wiring the bogies to some tags screwed to the chassis block. This worked for me, but I gather that Dapol stuff uses a huge variety of mechanisms, even between different batches of the same loco, so it is probably not a 'cure all' for everyone.

Thanks Steve. I'm thinking that you will be probably choosing a rather earlier date for your loco, so you can save yourself some pain by avoiding the headcode boxes altogether. Do avoid the prototype series locos because these had a different layout to the side panels (plus other differences), so the kit isn't right for them.

Thanks all. Rumour has it that Dapol may produce the class 22 in 'N' too but Mr Dave declined to confirm or deny this at the RMWeb members day. Hopefully my version will hit the tracks first. Andy

Thanks. I'm also thinking that most of the minor painting issues will disappear under the weathering... otherwise the paint stripper would have been deployed already. It would be nice to think that I could produce an ex-works paint finish if I wanted to, but this is only the third model that I've painted with an airbrush, so maybe with more practice.

A quick update photo from the paint shop of the body with all of its main paint colours applied residing in its custom Ferrero Rocher anti-dust cabinet. There is still a lot to do - the lower bodyside stripes are next followed by tidying up of all of the messy and oversprayed areas (especially where it is yellow and shouldn't be), transfers, varnish and weathering to a very work-worn 1969 condition. Not everything has gone completely to plan - the worst problem being that the green finish has tiny white flecks in it. This was caused by mixing some Humbrol white with the Precision green to 'pre-fade' it. It should have worked OK but it didn't. I later found out why... I started the yellow panels by masking with Tamiya tape (I lost count of how many pieces) and then loaded the airbrush up with thinned Humbrol white and found that it would not spray at all. It seems that my tin of white had degraded to the point where no amount of stirring would stop it congealing. It congealed in the airbrush cup and the lumps got picked straight up by the brush and blocked it. That tin has now been consigned to the bin. After over 1 hour of cleaning the airbrush and a brand new tin of white things were back on track. I'm still hopeful of finishing this before we reach 'Class 22 - Part 22'.

Nice. I could use one of those myself, but would be in engineers livery for the period I'm modelling - I gather that they were frowned upon for traffic purposes by the 1970s but seemingly OK for the engineers to use.