Himself has embarked on what could be a prolonged process of painting the new Vale of Ffestiniog.
Not only does the locomotive have quite a few colours on it but the places where they join are awkward.
For example, there is a very obvious fold line on the cab sides, but that is not where the dark green changes to the mid green.
Also, there's that long central body section full of access doors which is not conducive to a simple masking operation, either.
So instead Himself is planning to use his go-to workaround solution for situations such as these and use waterslide lining transfers to give him a target to aim at.
The reason the paint in the picture above looks so rough is that the shot was taken before the transfer was applied to mark the lower edge of the dark green upper section.
Still, it was his idea to build this second one, so.....
A complaint has flooded in!
Last week I cast a set of bogie frames for Vale of Ffestiniog (II) for Himself, but I am informed they are not up to scratch.
The problem seems to be the bottom half, which attaches to the swivelling bogie of the Farish chassis, is shorter than it should have been.
As a result, Himself has decided to use the upper casting, which is fixed to the chassis block, and scratch build a set of the lower parts.
These pictures give a good illustration of how we solved the problem of the bogie frames on the Funkeys being much taller than those on your typical 2mm scale diesel, and I think its quite an effective illusion.
You can also see how he attaches other extra details like the air tanks to the chassis block.
So there you go, that's customers for you. No pleasing them sometimes.
Honestly, who'd be a model manufacturer?
This week Himself's been doing a bit more work on version 2 of Vale of Ffestiniog.
Most of it is stuff you don't immediately see, such as making sure the body is sitting level and square on the Farish diesel chassis, and matching it up against its clone to make sure the ride height is set correctly.
In this front view you get a good look at some of the extra details Himself adds to these Worsley Works body kits.
The most obvious is the light clusters down near the buffer beam abd in the centre above the cab windows.
He's also fashioned the lip around the hole for the coupling shaft as well as the handrails, vac pipe and - new on this version - the lamp bracket in the centre between the lights.
Unfortunately - I think - this version won't have the lovely big twin headlamps because in the form he's chosen, it now has a rather less impressive set of square LED lights, much the same as those on the recently restored Garratt 130.
At my end I have cast the large fake bogie side frames and I'll hand those onto him the next time I'm passing.
I'm ready to put the Funkey bogie frames into production.
The master was completed with the aid of styrene strip and a butchered 10BA bolt to represent the springs.
That was made into a mould and copied four times to produce a second master to enable me to make a full set for a locomotive in one casting.
That will save a lot of effort given the number of enquiries I've had about these in the last few days.
I've another little commercial project to round off a busy year of casting.
This time a customer has asked if I can help him improve the bogies on the Farish chassis under his SAR Funkey diesels.
These have very big chunky bogie frames, but the N gauge model not so much...
It should be simple enough for me to copy and cast the same solution we used on our own models which was to divide the bogie frame into a top and bottom half.
The lower section, with the axle boxes and the suspension, is attached to the model's bogies which have been cut back at the sides.
The upper section, with the brake control gear and the sandboxes, is fixed to the metal chassis block.
Only when the model is going around a very tight curve are you likely to notice that only the bottom half is moving.
Once the masters are made it's a simple task to run off four copies.
