Friday, August 18, 2017

Standing Still

While writing the previous post I realised that I did have some model, albeit a tiny amount, to show you. If you remember from the last modelling post back in April I'd made a few small steps forward with my model of Tallylyn, including fitting the smokebox door. When I posted I'd just about convinced myself that I could live with the moulded smokebox door handles. Usually these are one of the first things I'd look to replace on a model, but I thought I could live with these, but a few comments on that post made me realise I'd regret not altering them.


So as you can see I've now gently removed the moulded dart, fitted a turned replacement, and resprayed the primer. The new dart looks quite different to the handles currently on Tallylyn but I've based these on old photos from the period I'm modelling the loco. I think this looks a lot better than it did before and I'm glad I didn't do any more work on the model before replacing the dart because it was easy to do without doing any damage; if I'd left it any later through the build process I'd probably have had to respray a top coat of paint which would have been much worse.

Unfortunately that was still the last modelling I've managed and I did this back in the second half of April so I've still no real progress to report.

5 comments:

  1. That looks good.
    Can you thin the primer and maybe warm it. It looks a bit coarse. I suspect an airbrush would sort the job.

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    1. I did warm up the primer although it did come from a can. It actually doesn't look too bad but the blog photo is much larger than life sized and looks rather cruel. Having said that I really must get the hang of using an airbrush, especially as I intend to airbrush the top coat on this model..... hopefully sometime this decade.

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    2. Spray painting is an art. An empty beans tin is good to practise on a it is curved and ha corners and ridges with a good surface finish. The final appearance is only ever as good as what is underneath it.

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    3. Mark, Autocad Fusion 360 is free to folk like you. It is fantastic and with 2 & 3 axis CNC table top machines becoming available secondhand may be worth a look. There are cheap 5 axis machine centres but you may have to win the lottery to get one.

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  2. Good move. Like you, I tend to notice this feature of the "face" more than the rest of the loco. So much so, I regret that RTR models now come with seperate darts. It's used to be the mark of a MODELLERS loco that they got replaced and was such a simple job that anyone could do it.

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