Floral wire & green twine drill-twirled trees: L-R: With WS coarse conifer only, conifer on top of WS dark green static grass, static grass only, WS green blend on top of conifer, green blend only. Really, I just wanted to be the 1000th poster.
1000th post is an incredible milestone! But more so are the milestones accomplished by each individual's workbench projects along the way! I'd like to invite everyone to step back through the pages and review the incredible work this thread has, and continues to showcase! You will be amazed.
Alco RS-2 I’m getting ready to paint a pair of undec Walthers/Life-Like RS-2’s from the latest run. Memo to Walthers: Please ask your factory in China not to glue cabs in place on undecorated units! I managed to gouge the body shell pretty badly getting the cab off to remove the window glass. The handrail ends were glued to the cab, too. What a pain. For the second unit, I think I’ll leave the cab in place and mask the windows. I wanted nose-mounted bells for my freelance units. I checked photos, and sure enough, both Detroit & Mackinac and GM&O had bells in this location on their RS-2’s, so it’s prototypical. The bell casting is Atlas part 544505 with the bracket filed to fit.
Yes Jerry, there were a LOT of the bents for the ice loading platform. Big milestone, ALL of the connective angle braces are installed. Will start the ice storage building while letting all those glue joints have a good long cure.
I think Athearn does this, too. Since undec, you could try the CA debonder to loosen the joint. The debonder does bad things to the paint IIRC. I agree that at least the cab should be left unattached.
Are you going to start making these for sale?? Sure gives a new dimension to the 50's era Could use a couple of these. :thumbs_up:
Im interested in the shrinking stuff too. Does it work on locomotives? How hard is it to make sure you get it to the correct size? Is there copyright issues with selling shrunk down things? Is this process more for personal model needs? Itd be cool to see a shrunk down GP40X.
I haven't tried anything as complicated as a locomotive shell. Any small free standing details would have to be left off. Plus, something like a locomotive with flat sides and surface detail everywhere would require zero air bubbles forming in the Hydroshrink - not an easy thing to accomplish. You would also have to cast it as a solid piece and then hollow it back out afterwards. I'm not sure about copyright laws, but it is obvious that a lot of the N scale resin vehicles being sold are shrunk down from larger scale masters. Here is a link to the how-to article I wrote in case you missed it: http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?t=127981 As far as getting something shrunk down to the exact size, that depends. Sometimes I get lucky and my Hydroshrink part has a perfect finish and is the right size (or close enough). In other cases, I have had to make six RTV/Naptha molds off of the mid-scale part before I got the mixture correct and the resulting part was close enough. On one vehicle I am trying to shrink down, I have made about eight Hydroshrink castings, and none of them have a finish on them that is good enough to continue. I think for something with a complicated shape like a locomotive shell, I would skip the Hydroshrink and simply make RTV/Naphta molds off of it. From HO to N this would probably take two to four stages.
I figured it probably wouldnt work on locomotives. Rapid prototyping machines would be the best bet, but idk how expensive that is. It would be cool to scan an HO model into a CAD program, redesign it to fit on a mech, rapid prototype it, make a mould, then cast a desired amount of it.
Attempting some 20' coal/ore cars from a RLW kit: Glue's still drying on some of the Nutboltwasher details. (now I see one that's a wee bit caddywompus. Darn that high quality & magnified digital photography! ) Need to add grabirons, brakewheel & shaft, and ream out the holes for the truck pins. Supposed to be a Nn3 kit, but fits N trucks fine. Might need a thin washer to get up to correct coupler height. Then some weathering Initial wash of boxcar red for sides and grimy black for bottom was a little weak: will make these the "old ones" and go a little stronger on the paint for the other 4 I have. Groovy kits!
This week I applied decals to BCR C-630M 701: Paint touch-ups, weathering and a final seal coat are next. Tim
Got some paint on my bridge... I think I'm gonna use it in a diorama. Now I need to hunt up some materials.
Finished up the 20T coal car kits from RLW: I added the handgrabs, nutboltwasher details, and coal loads in addition to the stuff included in the kit. The cars are soooooper light, so I put about three layers of 1/16" lead weight sheet at the bottom, with the coal being about 1/8" on the top, fixed with diluted white glue. Now they're nice & weighted, and look pretty groovy. Needs a bit of weathering on the sides, methinks.
TCS CN-GP installation on pre-DCC ready Atlas GP7 My first time installing a TCS CN-GP decoder on an Atlas GP7. Which shell should I run with? Plus decaled two locos that didn't have road numbers.
