Body paint

Painting of the Class 26 begins with an all-over coat of white. The grey base coat of primer takes the edge off the glaring colour a little which suits my purposes.

Everything still looks OK (the camera is bit cruel in this respect) under the new paint. I'm tempted to say that I'm copying the livery from Lion, but that would be a step too far even for my fantasist tendencies !



My plan was to mask off the bodyside line and windows, then spray with locomotive green. The grey roof will be hand painted as I can't be bothered to mask again and anyway, it's a colour that looks OK done this way. The waistline is cut from tape at 1mm tall. Probably too wide but as thin as I can manage by hand.



Back in the spraybooth, first I tired more white to seal the tape/body interface (how management consultant am I ?) and then on with some Precision loco green. Several light coats were sprayed and dried to get a depth of colour. Then I tentatively removed the tape, and it's not too bad. Perhaps I should have used Tamya tape as some of the edges are a touch more ragged than I'd like but generally, this looks OK. The wobbly bits by the front marker lights can be fixed by hand, they should be below the stripe but if they were, they'd be too low and the stripe has to be there to cross the side grilles at the right point.