The Barclay needs name plates. Many steam locomotives do and there is a huge (in model railway terms) industry producing them Go to many railway exhibitions and there will be a stand or two where the keen modeller can spend hours leafing through boxes full of tiny bits of etched brass trying to locate the details for a particular engine.
Sadly, when you build something unusual like an industrial engine, none of these boxes are going to have the name you want in there unless you are very lucky. I am not very lucky.
Lead time for producing custom etched plates is, I am told, about 9 months. That's about 8 1/2 months more than I had to produce the model, so an innovative solution was needed. In the past I've made up the odd nameplate using very small plastic letters. That's OK'ish but not really good enough for this model. Chatting about the problem in my local model shop someone suggested making them up on the computer.
Well I suppose I could do something from scratch but replicating the colour of the brass seemed difficult. Then it struck me - I had photos of the prototype plates, what would these look like reprinted to the correct size ?
The first problem was that the pictures weren't taken at right angles to the plates. Paintshop Pro enabled me to use some geometric manipulation to adjust the perspective and "flatten" the image. The results were then pasted into a DTP package (PagePlus) and re sized as required. I knocked these out in several variations and then printed the results on some semi-matt paper.
This looked OK so using, as they say in the magazines, a sharp scalpel blade I chopped out the plates from the sheet. The edges were blackened with a permanent pen and stuck in place with PVA.
Eventually a proper, etched set of plates will arrive but in the meantime these look pretty good.
No comments:
Post a Comment