More shades of grey have appeared in the workbench. As part of a makeover of a Hornby Railroad Class 40 I’ve tried out a technique used by a number of military modellers called pre shading. The picture above shows the early stages of this, it has worked particularly well on the roof and shows off the pretty good and subtle moulding of the original Lima tooling. Having said that there are some issues with the overall shape of the nose and cab area and detail locations of panels. For this project I left most of those unaltered but did change some which have had a surprising effect on the overall look. One thing that does alter the appearance significantly is the use of quality etches from Shawplan for roof fans and windscreen frames, these immediately take away some of the more obvious errors of the mould and give the model a much finer appearance. I’ve also used odds and ends from my scrap box to make other components, and the title of ‘impressionist’ really fits the bill with some of what I’ve done. I’m hoping that the makeover will run in due course in Railway Modeller, the model now being in final paint stages.
http://shawplan.wordpress.com/       http://www.shawplan.com/index.htm

Brush Cleaning 101

Regarding painting the 40 I’ve used a variety of paints, acrylic, enamel, and Oil based pigments, so don’t believe the fora keyboard warriors whom are out there telling people you can’t mix paint types on the same model. This is finished as a late green version, acrylic undercoat, enamel green body, acrylic grey roof and ends, details and washes in enamel/acrylic/pigment all with no problem. Just make sure you dry each coat properly. I detail paint with brushes and to get them really clean I use this little dodge which can be replicated with a bulldog clip. Leave the brush to ‘hang’ for five minutes or so in the appropriate thinner and most of the color will leach out. It protects the shape and tips of the brushes too.

This weekend is the excellent Railex exhibition at Aylesbury, it always reminds me of the fabled MRJ 1990 Westminster exhibition, due to the quality of the content in terms of layouts, traders and demonstrators David Lane manages to consistantly attract.
http://www.railex.org.uk/  One layout I’m looking forward to seeing is Chris Nevard’s Polbrook Guerney http://nevardmedia.blogspot.co.uk/ as he’s been working very hard to extend and ‘infill’ his earlier layout. Its always difficult to take an existing model and do this sort of work, hiding the joins between new and old are particularly challenging.
As far as traders go I have my shopping list at the ready, as do I imagine a good number of readers! I’ve got a couple of projects in mind, the Hornby 42XX, maligned in some areas, but in my opinion a pretty good starting point even at its  retail price, and a makeover of the Bachmann Pannier, This last one, to produce an interesting variant of it for this blog which I’ve not seen previously modelled. For the layout I tend to just make sure the chassis’ (of all types), I get run very well, with this pannier project I’m likely take it a little further whilst retaining the core elements of the chassis. The problem with this idea is if it works, I’ll be wanting to re-work the others to the same specification!

On the subject of Pannier makeovers George Dent has recently written a nice one in Model Rail No.183 using the London Transport model as his starting point. If you’re not familiar with his work, its here   http://georgedent.co.uk/  and also linked from the side bar.

Not Everyone
Works For Peanuts …