Sunday, December 09, 2007

Paint your wagon


3mm painted wagon
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
There’s not much easier to paint than a 16 ton mineral wagon. Black underframe, pale grey body. The only tough thing is a the end door stripe and I put this on with a bow pen. Just the job for a simple practise task.

Numbers are just blobs of paint when I do them in this and 4mm scale. I know I should use transfers but hate them enough on locos so wagons aren’t going to get a look in. Besides, once weathered I don’t think anyone really notices, or at least they are too polite to say if they do !

I tested the wagon on the layout again and disaster* struck. It kept falling off on the crossover. A quick check showed that somehow the whole model had twisted leaving one corner a millimetre or so off the rail. In 14.2, this matters. I suspect that the solvent used to assemble the body had set hard and pulled all the sides in a bit, and a bit more on one corner. Normally if you spot this early, twisting the ends in opposite directions sorts things out. I should have paid attention.

In desperation I slid a sharp blade under the offending corners and levered the solebar off the floor. When happy I ran some solvent along the join hoping to fix it where I wanted. This took a couple of goes but all seems well now.

*When I say “disaster” I realise this is in the context of making a toy train so it’s not important at all really.

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