LMS Dock Tank Kit

Dock Tank Kit
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

I've built one of these before. The kit is a Mercian etched brass product in 4mm scale (OO) for an ex-LMS dock tank.

More years than I care to think about have passed since I made my model and in the intervening time my skills have increased as has the toolkit available to do the job. This is good news as the kit is best described as "challenging" (in light of the recent comments by the culture secretary I better not put the words I used at the time in here for fear of an X rating for this blog !). In fact my version included a significant amount of scratchbuilding - boiler (I couldn't roll them at that stage), firebox, smokebox and cab roof. This time I expect to be able to use all of the kit. At least building the Garratt has given me plenty of practise making up Walschaerts valve gear !

Having said this, the resulting loco looks fantastic and works pretty well too. It's always been one of my favourite models and hopefully this one will look as good, if not better.

For more detials on the prototype, try Wikipedia

Porter 6

Porter 6
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

You should never throw anything away you know...

Porter 6, or the first engine for my On30 layout, has been weathered and is ready for service once I find a suitable crew. Wanting a really dirty engine once I had finished fixing all the bits the post office had carefully removed back on, I blobbed a bit of rust coloured paint in a few place before giving it a blast from the airbrush.

The main dirt colour is the stuff from a jar I tipped the remains of paint into while I was weathering the clyde puffer a few days ago. It's a dirt brown mix pretty close to the dark brown I'd normally use. And free 'cos I didn't have another use for it !

Earth colour under the footplate and weathered black along the top finished the job as usual and the result is a really filthy loco. A quick wheel clean and this model can go back in the box until we get around to building a layout for it.

Broken bits

Broken bits
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

When I delivered the recent batch of Porters to their new owner I picked up the original model locomotive I built. After a trip through the postal system, it needed a bit of repair.

Somehow the model had taken a serious shunt which has removed the front plank, bell, whistle and destroyed the coupling. Apparently the cab was bent back as well but by the time I collected the model this had been bent back.

I'm going to restore these parts and weather the loco so it can join my fleet for the On30 layout. Once this is done I'll have cleared the test track for something new.

Worst of Brede

Brede plan
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

The plan was to photocopy the sections from the Brede plan, transfer then to plasticard and fit these bulkheads to the vac-formed hull. Simple.

I made the foremost bulkhead and tried it. No way would this fit. Not a hope. Too tall, too wide and not nearly pointy enough.

OK, so the hull wasn't an exact match. I was prepared for this and decided plan B would be to get a couple of bulkheads in that fitted the hull I had and work from there. The hull didn't look too bad so I planned to try and use it, modifying things to fit.

One of the problems with a Bred is the hull has no straight lines. The deck sweeps up from the stern and this really contributes to the "look" of this vessel. Needless to say the plastic hull offered no guidance for this. I took a few measurements from the chine line upwards and then used a bit of plastic strip to join the dots.

The sweep at the bow still didn't look right. Too high and with an odd bend. Any hope of sanding this out and re-establishing a smooth curve disappeared when the attempts to do this with a sander fitted with the finest paper caused the aged plastic to shatter. Things weren't looking good. From the side the curves were wrong. From the top there were problems too - the bow wasn't symmetrical either.

In the end I've had to give up on this "kit". It has followed the Pilot boat into the bin. But, I've not given up on a building a Brede. It is a lovely looking boat and people have been really kind by sending me extra information. There has to be a way for me to build this model, and not one that involves a £120 1/12th kit either...

Missing link

Boat inner
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Boxing day. A time for sales apparently. Public demand requires Debenhams staff to be in store at 6am to prepare for opening an hour later. What you need to buy from a department store at 7 in the morning is a mystery to me and will always remain so as I was still in bed. Even when a more sensible time of day had arrived I eshewed the retail opportunities on offer in order to attend the boat clubs Boxing day sail (Geddit ?)

Not knowing how many would bother to turn up I didn't take anything spectacular from the boat collection. A RTR Thunder Tiger fishing boat seemed to be just the thing - large and easy to sail. It's bright red too which makes it festive in my opinion. The battery had been charged overnight and so I expected to unpack the model and be on the water in a matter of minutes. This was not to be.

Thunder Tiger models are excellent with proper radio gear and speed controls. They even use standard jelly cell batteries. These are connected with a short lead with spade terminals on one end and a Tamya plug on the other. This lead is used on the end of the charger - which is where it was when I got to the water.

A kindly fellow club member lent me a set of AA cells in a pack which had the correct plug on the end so I did make it to the water and enjoyed a pleasant half hour tootling around the lake. The favour was repaid slightly as my fellow sailors boat needed a shove a couple of times as it kept cutting out.

By the time we'd finished a few more keen types had arrived. Sadly they had decided to bring yachts but forgotten to carry a bag of wind (not a problem with all the sprouts eaten the previous day you would have thought) as well. One had also managed to leave the receiver battery switched on too. Some people will never learn - motors are a good thing. As long as you remember all the wires that is !

Dirty Puffer

Puffer 3
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

For more years than either of cares to remember, my Dad has had a Clyde Puffer under construction. It's a Caldercraft kit which has proved to have many shortcomings a problems for the unwary model maker. For much of the time the boat has sat on the shelf while he's worked on other things but every so often the plan was blu-tacked up and another burst of activity occurred. The project has advanced in fits and starts but finally has been completed.

My role has been to offer encouragement and a bit of helpfull (sometimes) advice. Buying a completed Puffer from the same kit was also very useful as we could see where another modeller had made adjustments to get the thing built. I've also been in charge of painting and just before Christmas I had to set up the airbrush to perform the final weathering.

My brief was to make a mucky model. The guide was to be a set of photos taken of the "Vital Spark" from the 1990's BBC TV series. On a trip to Scotland years ago he'd taken some photos of the vessel tied up in Crinan harbour. For TV purposes the boat had been weathered heavily and looked good in this guise. The only change we wanted was a different name - everyone has built a "Vital Spark" so we picked "Auld Reekie" which was the boat's previous name and much more redolent of Puffers.

While this isn't a big model in boat terms, for me it's larger than anything I've ever weathered before. I knew that there was no point in trying to do much with dry-brushing techniques as this would take forever. My best option appeared to be to drift dirt on with the airbrush. That way I could build up the effect gradually and hopefully stop work before reaching the point where a repaint would be required to sort things out !

Normally I mix up a weak paint in a paint cup and use this. For the puffer I half filled a paint jar with white spirit and poured in some Humbrol 170 (Dark brown). After testing the result on newspaper more spirit went in to bring the level up to 3/4 of a jar. This was sprayed from a distance of at least 12 inches and often 18. That was to allow drying time from brush to boat which hopefully would impart a little texture to the results. The entire model was treated to this but unevenly. The photos showed that dirt seemed to work up from the waterline and anyway I liked the effect it had on the nicely detailed hull.

Any leftover paint was poured into an old jar and a new mix made up with rust colour. The paint jar wasn't cleaned out so some of the old paint contaminated the new, helping the blending process and avoiding sharp changes of colour. Extra attention was paid to hatches and holes in the hull with rust running down from these a feature very obvious on the real thing.

Finally some Precision "Weathered Black" was made up and smoke residues blown on across the wheelhouse roof and mast where you'd expect the smoke to stick. The areas around the coaling hatches took a shot too as I don't suppose the crew were too careful or cleaned up after fueling !

I think this job only took about an hour - shockingly quick for such a large task. A little finishing up on some detail work, the cap steps were dry-brushed with metalcote steel to represent wear of example, did the job. Close up the weathering look OK but on the water and at a slight distance I've really pleased with it.

Merry Christmas !

Merry Christmas to all the readers of this blog.

I hope Santa has brought you all the goodies you wanted and that everyone has a new kit or two to be added to the pile of projects to be completed "one day".

Don't forget if you want to send me a present, just click on one of the adverts at the side of this text and Mr Google will send me a bit of money, and best of all it won't cost you a penny !

In the meantime go away and eat too much, watch rubbish telly (except for the excellent Wallace & Gromit which is unmissable - excellent stories, brilliant filming and you get to play "spot where the model bits came from" if you are a real anorak) and perhaps sneak away to your workbench while the rest of the family are too dozy to notice your absence. At least if your hands are busy with a scalpel or paint brush they aren't in the pot of chocolates. Modelmaking is a healthy pursuit !

Brede Lifeboat

Brede Kitbits
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

I have a clear modelling bench. This is not natural so I've dragged out a couple of projects, one train and one boat.

Starting with the boat, it's going to be a Brede Class lifeboat. 1/25th scale based on some vac-formed bits I bought at the model boat show a couple of years ago. The omens aren't good for this project as earlier this year I tried to build a pilot boat from the same source and had to abandon the job. The mouldings were horrible and hard information scarce.

One big difference this time is that I have a plan. And what a plan ! A quick e-mail followed by a cheque brought me a 6 foot long sheet of paper with a side, plan and section views with an absolute mass of detail. So much in fact, that my plan to build a reasonably simple model has been replaced with an idea that I'll be aiming significantly higher. One day I'd like to enter it into a competition class at the Midlands Model Engineering show.

The plan is to 1/20th scale so my first stop will be a photocopy shop to get the slices reduced. Then to the local model shop to acquire many sheets of plasticard to make bulkheads.

Obviously the model will be radio controlled - a cheap receiver plugged into a rather more sophisticated than normal speed control from Action Electronics is already in the bit box - bought at last years boat show. Still, 2 years gestation isn't bad for a modeling project is it ?

Oh, and in case you are wondering, here's what the model should look like eventually:

Clack Valve

Spencer Sutton asked "Whereabouts is the Clack Valve and what is it used for ?"

Good question. I had to go and look up the answer to this as while I've heard of a clack valve, it's exact purpose hasn't been that important to me. The answer can be found on here.

Essentially the clack valve is part of the injector and normally found on the backhead (the back of the boiler/firebox, above the door coal is shovelled into) of a steam engine. Operated by the fireman (normally) the injector allows water from the tanks or tender into the boiler. The clack valve is a non-return valve that makes sure water only flows one way.

The name by the way, comes from the noise the valve makes when operating.

Making aerosols work better

Underseal
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Someone clever once said, "Eat a live frog before breakfast and nothing worse will happen to you all day ". I've been staring at a frog for a couple of weeks and finally got around to chomping on it yesterday.

My frog appeared when I crawled under the camper van to try and work out why the heating was even more pathetic than normal. Nothing obvious appeared at the time but I did spot that sometime in the past I've scraped the bottom of the vehicle. Some dented tinware was quickly flattened but the damaged underseal couldn't be fixed at the time as I'd run out.

To buy time I sprayed some normal Waxoyl under there. That's OK for a while but I didn't fancy it's chances with all the water on the roads at present. That water contains road salt or VeeDub killer as it's better known for the ability it has to promote rust. A new can of spray underseal was acquired and has sat in the garage taunting me for a week. A cold and wet week. The sort of week that makes you want plenty of protection on the bottom of a car and yet provides no incentive to crawl around underneath one. And yes I know this sort of job should be done in the summer thank you very much.

With reasonable weather and a conscience biting at me I slipped out to wire brush the affected area (the rear cross member) and give it a shot of Eastwood Rust Encapsulator. This came out very well in a recent rust stopping test in one of the classic car mags so I thought it was a worthwhile thing to do. My plan was to top it off with underseal to protect against flying stones.

So there I am lying on my back under the van having given the spray can a shake for the regulation two minutes, pressed the nozzle. Nothing. Well, not quite nothing but a pathetic excuse for a spray. Another shake and no real improvement. And I really didn't fancy using the brushable stuff for such a small job - it's horribly messy. Forget to wear a big rubber hazardous chemicals protection suit and you'll be washing it off for days in my experience...

My suspicion was that the viscous liquid in the can had solidified while sat in the cold garage. When shaking it I couldn't hear the ball bearing in the can (has anyone ever seen one of these ?) that I assumed would be in there. Perhaps all it needed was warming up ?

With the house empty I made a bath in the sink for the can with lovely hot water from the tap and a bit from the kettle. 15 minutes or so later the can was warm and the ball bearing could be heard on shaking. Best of all the black stuff sprayed out beautifully.

Making letters

Auld Reekie
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

My Dad is just finishing a Clyde Puffer kit and since he is colourblind, I've been handling the painting duties. I also get to apply the name to the boat since "You get on better with those letters than I do.".

So yesterday I was using my normal method of letter a boat when I hit a snag. The part used BEC lettering sheet may have had enough E's on it, good news considering the number of them in the name, it didn't have enough U's. I was precisely one short.

Now I want to see this boat finished, it's been 10 years in the building thanks to some long periods on the shelf while other projects take precedence. It's very nearly there though and this is the final push. Ordering a new sheet of sticky letters during the Christmas period wasn't going to be a good idea.

Scanning the sheet for something I could make a U out of I decided after a fair bit of measuring that the best bet was the bottom curve of an S (the last on the sheet) with verticals from the supplied dashed line. Several other characters were either slightly too wide or too narrow. To be honest the variety of letter widths both surprised and frustrated me.

A bit of poking around with a sharp scalpel has given me a reasonably neat result. This vessel is intended to sail rather than live in a glass case anyway so anyone close enough to notice will have wet feet !

On30 Tipper wagon

On30 Tipper waggon
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

A coat of primer and it's time to start the painting process. Having read "The Art of Weathering" this model seemed like a suitable candidate for the flaking rust technique. To achieve this the theory is that you paint some bits in rust colours which when dry have Maskol (a rubbery masking substance, think non-stick Evo Stick) blobbed on them. Then you paint the wagon. Once it's dry the Maskol is picked off with tweezers revealing rust.

I tried it and it's rubbish. Mind you I've never really liked the results in the book or when I've seen them carried out on other peoples' models.

I did try to soften the edges of the rust patches with the airbrush but in the end I just painted the whole thing with browns and greys. Once my rust patches had been covered up the results weren't bad.

Feeling that more effort ought to be expended and since this is a test piece so I might as well experiment, I tried out some MIG acrylic paint. This took a fair bit of thinning and when I ran it into the crevasses didn't do anything for me. Mind you I've never got on with acrylic paints.

Finally I attached the model with weathering powders. These have worked for me in the past imparting colour and texture as required. Sadly they reacted with the MIG paint, which hadn't dried fully, and just went black. Overnight drying made things look a whole lot better so I assume the effect is only temporary.

The end result looks pretty nice. It's suitably crusty and worn without being completely knackered - in other words just the sort of thing you'd see on a working railway line.

Tipper wagon

Tipper
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

One day I will build an On30 model railway. I have the plans, some buildings, a loco or two and some wood for the baseboards. What I'm short of is rolling stock. You see while Bachmann make some very nice RTR models, they are all designed to run behind big locomotives. Put even the smallest tippers behind a Porter or Critter and they loom over it. For the models I want to build, I need something smaller.

Wrightlines (now ABS models) seemed to have the right sort of thing with their v-dump tipper wagon kit. It's O-16.5 so the right scale (sort of, stop being pedantic). At 12 quid we aren't looking at the cheapest kit on the planet but in a specialised scale so it's par for the course. Put in RTR terms, 3 of these will cost the sames at 3 Bachmann v-dumps but you have to build these.

Kit assembly starts with the soldering together of the bottom chassis. This includes axleboxes so you have to trap the wheels during building. With a hot soldering iron this is fairly easy - solder allow the join to be made and then adjusted if required. I needed to fit Kadee couplings and as far as I could tell the way to do this was to hack a hole through the girders and replace this with some real metal. Just to make things more interesting the coupling box has to go right through the structural metalwork. I soldered a bit of nickel silver scrap etch in the bottom and then another in the top, trapping the coupling box. Of course I worked one end at a time and it seemed to work OK.

The bucket is a reasonably simple brass etch. Admittedly there are no aids to location but tack soldering bits in place and adjusting as required worked OK. I decided from the outset that this would be a well weathered model and very tatty so if my building was a little rough around the edges it wouldn't matter.

As a kit I'd say you need to have some building experience to get the best out of it but not much. If you are new to whitemetal and brass then there are simple models out there. It is a lot cheaper than a locomotive though so a useful step on the road (rails ?) toward fully fledged kit building.

Boxed Porter

Boxed Porter
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

These locos have to travel to sunny Leicester (The San Tropez of the East Midlands) tomorrow so they need to be packed up. To me, the obvious plan was to put them back in the nice padded Bachmann boxes the locomotives originally arrived in.

Snag is, thanks to the longer can, and in some cases, fatter chimneys they wouldn't fit. I needed to alter the foam packing. Fortunately this comes as three layers like a sandwich. The "bread" is flat foam and the "filling" is a nutritious fat lump with shaped holes in it.

I carefully marked out the new shape with a felt tipped pen and then tired hacking away with scissor. This was rubbish and untidy so I tried a X-acto saw. This worked better with some neat lines but even the finest blade snagged. Finally I used a cheap snap-off blade knife with the blade fully extended and used in a sawing motion. This worked a treat producing nice neat and straight lines. OK, straightish but they do the job and this model now travels reasonably securely.

Finished Porter Lineup

Finished Lineup
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Job done - 5 detailed, painted and weathered On30 Porter locomotives.

Each one is a little different from its brothers yet they all look similar, as though a line had bought them all at the same time yet each had been used slightly differently. Perhaps some were better steamers than others and saw more action. Maybe the shed was a single line and drivers simply took the nearest loco out so on quiet days some didn't get exposed to the elements.

I like them a lot. Bother the stove pipe and spark arresters chimneys looks nice. The later look a lot better than the ones supplied by Bachmann though.

To take a closer look at these models, I have grouped the portraits together here for your enjoyment.

Wood pile

Wood pile
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Tradition has it that American steam locomotives burn wood. As the early white settlers built their way across the country, digging coal out of the ground wasn't a priority and there were plenty of trees to burn so that's what they did. Of course the trees were supplemented by arrows donated by a population who thought they had colonised the country quite effectively and didn't see why anyone else should have a go.

You may notice my entire grasp of US history has been learned from cowboy films, but as these are certain to be accurate this will do.

Anyway, the Porter locomotives needed fuel and that means I can't use my stocks of Welsh Steam Coal. Instead I spent an hour chopping up artists matchsticks to get enough for 5 locomotives. As well as cutting to length I carved and split corners so nothing looked to regular. Mind you, if you've ever split wood with an axe (ax for US readers who apparently have an aversion to vowels) it's amazing how square cornered the results are.

I did wonder about weathering the resulting wood but the colour is pretty good and the fuel wouldn't stick around long before ending up on the fire so it surely wouldn't get that dirty ?

Weathering Porters

Weathered Porter
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

At last, a job that is quicker when working on a batch of models - weathering.

Only a light coat of dirt is required so I've been drifting this on from the airbrush. With 4 models to work on I was able to use most of a paint cup of "dirt" each time instead of abandoning most of it.

Today's problem involved temperature, or the lack of it. Our garage isn't heated and when the mercury drops, cellulose thinners cause enamel to go lumpy rather than watery. Switching to white spirit solved the problem and I sprayed away with the airbrush in one hand and a hair drier in the other.

Painted Porters

After a quick coat of primer the Porter locomotives received a blast of Precision black paint. This was left to harden overnight and then all the brown wooden bits and brassy metal bits were picked out by brush in the appropriate colours.

Thanks to my own stupidity the lenses on the headlamps had to be cleaned up 'cos I forgot to mask them when priming. Some watch glass cleaner applied using a cotton bud did this and I only had to scrabble on the floor looking for a couple of them when they flicked off the workbench. I'll try and remember to cover them up during the last stage - weathering.

Another touch is that various oil cans have been added to the locos. This, and the numbers, differentiates between some otherwise very similar engines and provide odd highlights of colour amongst the black.

Filler strip

Plasticard filler strip
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Taking the steam dome off a Bachmann Porter exposes the worm gear of the mechanism. In the Backwoods kit a bit of brass is provided to fill the hole. I think that the design has changed slightly and pulling the dome off now takes a curved part away as well which runs down the side.

This part could be separated and glued back in place followed by the brass filler bit BUT that way results in a patchwork effect unless hours are spent with filler and files.

Far easier is to cut a bit of the thinnest plasticard 6.5mm wide and fit this over the area. Glued down and painted this looks right. I even contemplated riveting the edge but decided that that wouldn't fit in with the rest of the model.

The photos shows the wheels and waggly bits masked for painting. Since they can't be removed fully I like to get some protection on them from the primer - it's a pig to remove when it gets where you don't want it.

Cheap tool

Cheap tool
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.

Ladies & Gentlemen, allow me to present the most useless wire cutter ever produced. I tried to cut a wire with it and one of the jaws broke off.

There are lessons for us all here I think:
1) Do not grab the nearest to tool to do a job. Get the right one.
2) Just because the wire looks soft it doesn't mean that a little pair of cutters will go through it.
3) Fat wire needs the big cutters. Or better still a piercing saw.
4) If a multipack of pliers and cutters costs the same as a pint of beer, the quality might not be of the highest order.

To top it off, when the cutter broke the handles grabbed the skin on my hand and I now have a lovely little blood blister. Just my lick to find the one pair where the sharp edges are the least destructive part of the package !