Hey Mike, sorry we didn't hook up, could have used a few extra arms to keep the kids out of the displays ). Not sure the placards would have been able to be made out of brass...attachment is always a issue without any sort of substrate to support it especially a ribbed surface. Once attached you couldn't print on them as the pad printer would most likely compress the brass or stainless and distort it over the ribs or glob of glue it was attached with. It takes a lot of pressure to force the rounded faces of the pad printer flat onto a surface, that's why we make jigs that support the inner surface of the car out of metal. Best case (as we do with the enclosed autoracks) is to paint and print in advance and then attach. If we had to make a new tool for those styrene parts, then you are looking at multi thousands of dollars for that, and then modification of the tooling of the car to allow for inserts for the plug-ins. Going back and coring a heat treated mold is not a pleasent or cheap task. You can't drill so you have to invest in some EDM work here in house...then how do you plug the holes afterwards? Making fixtures to fix a floating secondary object never seems to work out...picture glue squishing out in all directions no matter how careful they are...trust me I've tried to float that through a few times and got B-Slapped by the Production Folks!! ) . The actual printing isn't a big issue...nest would be a minor one but would need to be modified. The placard would need to not touch the nest to avoid any chance of it getting jarred loose in shipping especially if it were brass and glued to a disimmular material. A small well would need to be cut into the tools. It's the kind of modification that could be done to existing nests and not inhibit the use of it with non modified cars. Going back to the tool for the placards, that cost would need to be spread over a series of releases to make it a minor cost shift up, like a few dollars, or better a few cents. I don't know what the actual run was, but generally when we do a new tool we look at how many runs it will take to pay it off and those numbers are generally several 10's of thousands of parts to get a number that doesn't inflate the final costs. I suspect this run was several hundreds or a few thousands each, but don't quote me. Sometimes we do it right an anticipate some of these issues and make the parts before hand as we did with the Autoracks and a few others. So confusing...my head hurts! ) Joe
Now you have me itching to get home and pull out some rolling stock with placards attached. I know Athearn has done this a few times, Red Caboose, and maybe Atlas too. Will have to look at what they did. I seem to remember the Athearn ones being photo etched, and I should be able to see tell tale signs if they were painted before or after being glued on. I would never suggest modifying existing tooling, or tooling a new part for a run of 150 pieces! Sometimes the numbers work for runs of 4-500 pieces in simple brass molds (my favorite since no cutting fluid is required!). But if we had to look at mounting pins and placard tooling, then we're way out of scope for this project. Sorry about your head, but production facinates me. ;-)
Yeah, and my guess if that is true, is that brass will be showing through where they clipped the part off the fret. They wouldn't have paid someone to touch up that bit of paint, I bet. I suppose too, that they could have been painted and printed one at a time, but that might require some fancy vacuum plate to hold them in position for pad printing and all. Maybe the Chinese really would be able to do all that economically.
Would not be that hard to make a decal for that, and make a placard out of .005" plastic or sheet brass, paint and apply the decal to it, then using transfer tape, apply the placard to the model. That way those that really wanted, can have the more accurate model.
When Ztrack decided to offer this run, we did so with the knowledge that these cars would not be 100% prototypical. But, we also knew that MTL offered a template that achieved very high accuracy to represent the prototype. Frankly, let's be honest. Very few injection molded products are 100% prototypical. That is why we have brass lines. Let's not blur the lines. We marketed these cars to fit into a price range that would be attractive to the Z community. At $67.50, we realized this set is more than the standard MTL two car run. BUT, we also come in under other MTL collector's cars that tend to sell at $40.00 a car. We did not want to go above $70.00 a set since our goal was to appeal to more of the Z community. If you are looking for near perfect cars, than look no further than the Ztrack FR subscriber cars we offer every year. The Milwaukee PS2-cd hopper does have the correct plate on it. It also appears in the correct MILW and leased version. The Rio Grande we offered the year prior does not have have this plate. It also has a different number of ribs. Of course, these cars also sold for roughly $100.00 a piece. At this price range, it does exclude some customers from purchasing. Again, the our goal with the DT&I is to be more attractive to more of the Z community. Ztrack will continue to offer subscriber cars from FR that will have a high level of accuracy and a price point to match. We also plan to continue our special runs with MTL. MTL does incredible work and we see their expanding line as an opportunity to bring interesting prototypes, roadnames and mixed consists to the market at a price that is fits most Z scalers budget. We acknowledge that these sets may not be 100% accurate, but our goal is to be very high in accuracy and not produce 'fantasy' products. As of now, we are working very hard with the staff at MTL on our next run. There are challenges associated with picking roadnames that may not be covered and documented as the large roads. Our next set will have some compromises, BUT, it will capture the prototypes very closely. It will also give the Z market another roadname of interest. I am very grateful to the staff at MTL for working with us on these runs and helping us get them as correct as possible. We are looking forward to a long term relationship and continuing to offer intriguing new releases. Photos of the DT&I set, Milwaukee and Rio PS2-cd hoppers can be found at: http://www.ztrack.com/imprint/imprint.html Rob
I think there's some confusion about my original comment. I in no way, shape, or form was saying that this set was crappy, or that it was useless, or that it shouldn't have been made at all. I just commented that it wasn't "prototypical" as specifically called out in Rob's original post, quoted above. Several posts have been made seeming to imply that I think non-100% prototype stuff should never be made. That couldn't be farther from the truth. At this point, I'm sorry I brought it up at all.
I pulled this car out of storage at lunch today. It has an etched metal placard on it that was painted and printed prior to final assembly. It was painted on the etched fret, as there is still evidence of the tabs along the bottom, with brass showing through the paint. Atlas is using a soft, contact type glue to attach these. There was no evidence of glue oozing out anyway, so the Chinese have that part figured out. I also pulled out an Athearn autoparts box that also had an etched plaque. It too was painted separately from the shell. It was glued on with brittle super glue, as evidenced by the "super glue clouds" evident on the shell when I pulled the placard off. While the Atlas glue choice was probably better in the long run, that super glue held up fine. No evidence of oozing glue on the Athearn car either. I didn't find any Red Caboose cars with a placard in my collection. So, Joe is right, I would have to add the cost of spraying a sheet of placards brown. They should be easy to pad print at that stage too.
Chris only cares because it's Erie! And it's his fault it doesn't have one, he erased it. I have no shame.
I erased mine too, but I turned around and gave it the love it deserves. http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/el/frt/erie20012ab.jpg
Nice weathering on that car Chris, did you use chalks? By the way I purchased the DT&I set and must say they look pretty darn good, even if they are more modern
Ok, here is where I sound stupid, what do you mean by dry brushing? Is that like the Bragdon weathering system that I hear about?
Dry brushing is where you dip your paintbrush in the paint, then blot most of it off on a paper towel or something, and with barely any paint left on the brush you gently brush over something. What happens is the model get just a hint of the paint. it also brings out details and highlights.
I use a short, sort of stiff bristled brush. Dip it in some cheap craft store paint, don't put a lot of paint on the brush. Then you stipple the brush around on a paper towel or something till there is hardly any paint left. I like to use a piece of scrap board that is the opposite color of the paint. Like if I'm dry brushing a light color I use a board painted flat black. That way the color will show up and I can see just how much paint is left with every stroke. Once the paint looks right, you just brush it all over the model. It will hit all the raised detail and sort of hight light it, but you can see some in between the ribs as well. I use dirt colors on most cars and some silver on the roof. And I would try it first on some scrap box pieces to get the feel of it. If you feel you dry brushed on too much paint you can usually cover it with more dry brushing of the models base color. http://www.finescale.com/fsm/objects/pdf/dry-brushing.pdf Most places list just wiping the brush on a tissue, but to me that way is hard to tell how much paint is still on the brush, so I would recommend a dark test surface every time. This way you won't accidentally put way too much paint on your model. See how all the raised areas are lighter, like the roof ribs and the side panels. This is from dry brushing. There are other ways to weather. I almost aways use some sort of dry brushing after washes and before or after Dullcoat. You don't need to dry brush, but you may like it.
