Thursday, December 09, 2010

Things you never knew you wanted part 12 - Weld bead

Browsing the latest copy of Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette, my eye is taken by a rather impressive model of a Plymouth Diesel locomotive in 1:20.3 scale.

Reading the article there is obviously a lot of scratchbuilding and that's a good thing as you get to learn lots of new techniques. Milling the frames from "natural" ABS looks pretty impressive even though I'm not sure how natural ABS is. Can you get it in a garden centre or health food shop ?

It wasn't this that really interested me though. At the detailing end of the text, there is mention of replica weld bead made of resin but fixed to waterslide transfer paper so you apply it like a decal. "That sounds a bit crazy" I thought but as there was a website address, I decided to have a look anyway.

It's true Weld Bead is available. All a bit large scale for my work - lets face it in anything smaller than G1 you'd be hard put to see the lines and if you did they would look over scale - but for the growing finescale movement in larger scale modelling they are a boon.

What did interest me though are the HO scale rivets applied in the same way. These could be just the job for replacing those removed by sanding on RTR models undergoing detailing. Sadly at 13 quid a sheet plus postage I'll not be in a rush to try, but if anyone knows a UK supplier...

More on the Archer Transfers Website

No comments: