Spent a quiet afternoon/evening doing the detail work on 4 W wagons. The biggest job was making the door latches. These were soldered up from 1/2mm brass wire, with small diameter fuse wire wrapped around the main upright and then soldered into place. Making 8 of these took about 2 hours with a bit of quiet swearing thrown in, as well as the standard searching for tiny bits in the carpet.
The results are as follows.
W5 wagon. The easiest of the lot
W6 wagon. The only one in the seven types to have a double door.
W7 wagon. Again quite simple
W8 wagon. WTF? Suddenly the wagon designers decide that they need outside bracing up the wazoo, and its not overly easy to get the bits on the corners to match up properly. I'm now really not looking forward to the W9-11 which are next on the list.
10 comments:
Just jumped into this one! Are you planning on casting these for mass comsumption? or doing one offs?
Looking good though! my second fav wagon to the La series
was not overly planning to mass produce, but if there is a decent level of interest...
I wont be needing any myself....but how about making the molds available for "hire" so the masses just need to supply their own resin and time? Pay a deposit refundable on return?
That then frees you up from the job of having to turn out 50 odd wagon tops.
I've been wondering how we might promote more of a co-op type of arrangement among modellers, and I guess that hiring molds would be one good way of doing it. I think that's a good idea.
My main reason behind the idea is that it doesnt place huge burdens on "The Few" (i.e those who are expected to produce the tops for everyone) but instead provides the tools to allow everyone to achieve with the investemnt of some money (for resin) and time. Also, The availibility of a high quality locomotive mold would be the next best thing to a kit.
The problem I can see is that the resin tends to stuff the rubber after 25-30 shots ( I'll get back to everyone on this as I've got one thats still going).
Thus one person might burn the mold out, or the next person only get's 1 or 2 before the mold is shot.
Following Darryl's series, its possible for anyone to do a job thats no worse than what we are doing. All you need is the master.
Any tricks to those nice smothly cured roofs?
A small diameter metal rolling rod and strapping muscular thighs.
I thought about a model where you rent a mold for a base price plus a per-cast price. It relies on honesty, and someone might handle the mold roughly and stuff it?
How 'bout selling molds instead of renting them? That's what we do with rock molds isn't it?
Its an alternative to buying individual castings, which is still possible in parallel with selling molds.
Molds with some life left in them might also have some resale value on the second-hand market?
I'm about to get into my first mold-making exercise, so haven't got a handle on the costs involved. What sort of raw material cost involved in a mold and a casting - say the UK or XP featured in the last post, or these W wagons (aside from master and time costs, IP etc)?
Topmark sell resin and rubber in 500g packs(the smallest size). This will set you back about $100. there is enough rubber to do 5 molds of W size (2 piece) or Uk (1 piece). There is enough resin to do about 15-20 shots from each of these 5 molds. I also have done some smaller molds with details (brake levels etc) that can be filled with the dregs of whatever is left.
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