Cooking Fat!

He's done it again!

Not content with demolishing the Up home signal on Dduallt while Himself was away on holiday last summer, the other day the mischievous moggy was found taking a fancy to Bron Hebog.

In this case it was probably the sheaves of research photographs which made an irresistible place to perch, but I fear he'd find the the scatter just as comfy.

This will not be tolerated!

It reminds me of the joke about the man who comes back home from the pub a little worse for wear one night, trips over the family pet and declaims: "I'll kill that cooking fat!"

Three Walls

So I've made a little progress with scribing the stone walls on the old barn, as you can see.

These are the walls for the smaller section at the front.

There will be a taller, four-sided structure that this attaches to in due course.

Each side was about and hour and a half's work so there's a chance I may get the basic shell completed by next week sometime.

Describing The Barn

After my last post about starting work on the model of the old barn a few people got in touch to ask about how I scribe stonework into the styrene?

(And a few others wanted to question my sanity...)

One of the questions was about what kind of tool I used.

I don't know exactly what it's called but this picture may help.

I've read some suggestions that it's some kind of dental tool - which rather puts me off ever going back to the dentist, if you ask me - but all I know is that I picked it up on a tool stand at an exhibition more years ago than I can remember.

I use the tool a the left hand end - the sort of pointy-spoon-shaped piece.

I hold the shaft very close to the bottom in the same way as you would a pen. The point is very sharp and it doesn't that that much pressure and a couple of passes to gouge out a convincing amount of styrene.

There are different types of plasticard, I know, but the stuff I use is probably a lot softer than you might think it is if you've never seen this done before.

The effect, I think, is rather good, especially at a distance.

The only problem is that the surface is much too smooth very rough or lumpy stones, but it's quite acceptable (to me anyway) for walls built out of Welsh slate blocks which can be quite flat.

Besides which, once it's six feet away from the viewer, as this will be, who is ever really going to notice?

Blackout

The new service car is going straight into the paintshop over at Himself's place.

Before it gets a coat of primer, though, he had to cut, fit and paint the glazing.

Paint?

Yes, paint.

In what, I suppose, was an attempt not to make the new carriage not stand out too much in a rake of standard saloons they fitted windows even in places where they are completely obscured by the internal fittings.

In previous carriages there were solid panels in these spots but on 125 there is blacked out glass instead.

Our solution has been to carefully mask off the areas on the pieces of perspex and apply black paint to the innner surface.

And a metalic grey in the case of the toilet compartment.

I think the effect is going to be very realistic when the body shell is painted.

Barn Blanks

I've picked up my scalpel for the first time in 2017.

My first project this year will be to fill in one of the very glaring gaps on Bron Hebog, the old barn which sits in the middle of the S bend as the line climbs out of Beddgelert.

Usually with the buildings on the layouts it is cutting out the windows from the blank pieces which is the most bothersome task.

This model doesn't have so many of those to worry about, and even though I will have to scribe all the dry stone effect into the styrene what's really going to be tricky is depicting the roof.

You can't really see it from the angle in this photo but the smaller half of the building at the front was in a very dilapidated state at the nominal date we set the layout, even though some renovation work has taken place since.

There were many slipped slates and large areas where the rafters are exposed - it's going to be quite a challenge to get right.

Service Car Roof

Himself found the time for a litle light modelling in the run up to Hogmanay and cut, shaped and fitted the brass roof to the service car 125.

We use this solution on on the superbarns - rather than our usual method of styrene secured to a flat, false ceiling - because of the the inboard doorways at each end of the carriage.

Although the (slightly) larger WHR saloons also have inset doorways they have a flat section above them rather than the curved profile and the toplight above of the FR superbarns.

Breezy Does It

While Himself was busy inserting fence posts around the farm scene on the layout he took another look at our research photos and discovered that there were some walls missing.

Not your iconic Welsh dry stone walls, but walls built out of what you and I would probably call breeze blocks.

So he asked if I could knock some up by scribing into styrene?

Seeing how he was only needing around a foot of wall, in total, I agreed.

When I sat down to do it between Christmas and New Year, though, I realised I'd forgotten just how boring it can be.

By the time I'd scratched out six inch's worth I decided I couldn't face doing it another three times - because you have to do it on the back as well - and it occurred to me that there was no good reason why I shouldn't short circuit the process by using this first piece as a master and casting the rest.

Thanks to my inherent laziness I was able to leave the silicon rubber to set overnight and then the next morning, in the space of 2 hours, cast four sections which he can now use to make the 1 foot section of wall required.

So now I'm freed up to move onto the next project.

The bad news is that it also involves a lot of scribing into styrene and this time there will be no resin rescue option.