Carriage Painting Continues

While Himself has been busy extending Bron Hebog onto the new board I have been plugging away with painting the three Super Barns I have been commissioned to build.

This is the first of the trio ready to be varnished.

There's not much to be said except that in radical development (for me) I sprayed the cream colour before brushing on the maroon, black, grey etc in the traditional fashion.

It was something I did to save time and although results are adequate I suspect it would work out a lot better doing it with an airbrush where you can direct a fine spray just where you want it as opposed to the rather crude delivery from a hobbyists aerosol.

The second carriage is all but done, as I type, and I'll be starting work on the third and final one soon.

Rip It Up And Start Again

We've reached big milestone in the Bron Hebog project - starting work on the final scenic board.

This is the one which completes the last stretch of the S Bend running along the back of the layout from Cutting Mawr to Bron Hebog Crossing behind Cwm Cloch farm.

Before anything could be done to it, however, the baseboard had to be dismantled and rebuilt because it had become slightly skewiff on account of being stored for a while in a damp location.

Fortunately with this design of baseboard it is relatively straightforward to unscrew it and reassemble the component parts which is what you see happening below.

Once put back together the board was taken into the workshop to check that it did indeed still fit within the gap left for it.

Fortunately it did!

In the next two snaps you can see how Himself has cut the footprint of the trackbed from a sheet of plywood and laid it roughly in position.

You can see this section is another dog-leg straight which swings towards the middle section of the S bend below it before curving away again and off into the forest beyond.

There's still so much to be done but you can really believe now that this project that we've been working on for the last decade and more will, one day, be finished.

More Stone Walls

There is work going on at more than one location on Bron Hebog at the moment.

As well as the progress landscaping the latest house in the Oberon Wood estate, which I posted about a couple of days ago, Himself has also been adding some of the stone walls at the back of the layout around Cutting Mawr.

The product we use for stone walls is these plaster units produced by Ten Commandments which we've found to be very adaptable even on a very uneven landscape such as the one we're modelling.

Himself spent some of his spare time on his recent volunteering trip to Wales doing some final research in this area to try to ensure we have these walls in roughly the correct position relative to the embankment and the cutting.

He's now waiting for the plaster to harden fully around the big rocks in the cutting before finishing painting the basic scenery, and then adding the small scenic rocks and rubbish, then finally ballasting the track.

Boys From The Black Stuff

Himself has become fed-up waiting for his Evergreen square tile sheet to turn up (it's apparently on back order) so he has decided to scribe his own paving.

The steps have been made and fitted up the side of the house and at the front.

Plaster infill has just been put in and is waiting to set and the road has had it's first coating of tarmac - hence the title of the post which has probably bamboozled any readers from outside the UK and those born after 1980.

You can see in this shot how the house is designed to fit into a 'hole in the ground' and also a bit more detail of the scribed styrene paving.

Breaking Rocks

Himself has been busy taking out his frustrations on the lump of Mother Wales he brought back from his travels a few weeks ago.

Now pulverised into suitably sized chunks he has begun fixing bits into place to represent the rock of Cutting Mawr.

As you can see, the advantage of using genuine rock is that if you choose your lump carefully it comes ready-weathered and these pieces appear to have fractured quite nicely to look like the handiwork of McApline's 1920's navvies.

Once the fragments have various bits of foliage stuffed into the cracks it should look a lot less like a stoney jigsaw puzzle.

Squirty Cream

I've progressed onto painting the batch of Super Barns I've been working on for the last few weeks.

I make no secret that I'm trying to cut corners wherever I can on this project. So as well as resin casting many of the carriage components I'm going to try spray painting some of the colours to see if I can speed up what is normally a very long and drawn out process.

The colour I've chosen to spray is the cream section of the two tone WHR livery.

Because I don't own an airbrush it's not an option to spray the red because it's a shade I mix myself blending equal amounts of scarlet and crimson. I can also buy an aerosol can of cream enamel spray off the shelf, so that's what I'm doing first.

I'm also taking the precaution of masking off as much of the lower (red) bodysdie as I can because, as I explained in a post a few days ago, I hope another one of my shortcuts will prove to be using red oxide as the shade of primer in the expectation it will reduce the number of coats of red I need to brush on.

With my usual grey primer a carriage can need as many as three.

So here's the carriage after a couple of coats of the cream spray which cured within a few minutes allowing both sides to completed within a single evening session.

Here, with the masking tape removed, the effect is already quite convincing and it looks as if my cunning plan might just work!

Patio Season

Some small jobs have been done on Bron Hebog ahead of the Easter holiday, one of which has been setting the base for the 3rd house and fixing its position.

The picture shows how I'm building these models with deep 'foundations' so they can be sunk into position. The plywood you can see in front of the big patio doors is the true ground height.

Himself has ordered in some square tile styrene sheet which he will use to represent the patio slabs and the steps which descend on the northern (Rhyd Ddu) end of the house beside the path leading down from the footbridge across the cutting.