¡Hola! The 3-Foot 6 DM Class - 3

DB perambules onwards in Spanish:

Glazing.... This was really hard. The easy bit was painting some clear styrene with Tamiya Smoke. 

The DM has two cabs of course. One of mine is at the, well lets call it the 'good end' which will have a driver and lead the trains, and the other is the crappy end, which will face the wagons. The bad end has a lovely coupler and a broken 3d-printed cab handrail that I knocked off somehow during the current commissioning process. The good end has all its handgrabs intact and a recycled coupler that is a bit gummed with glue, but as it is in the lead, it won't be used much anyway.

I glazed up the bad end first.

The side windows were cut to shape and some Microscale Kristal Klear (kringeworthy naming aside) which was dabbed on the inside, using whatever tiny holes remained available to prod a stick with a small blob of it around the inside. Tweezers then forced the glazing up into the inside through the little hole under the cab and attempted to place it in the right location without smearing too much Kristal Klear about on the visible glass face. Not an easy task.

The front piece was cut to the approximate size and shape by trial and error (not an easy task for my eyes against the black painted window frame background (so it might be easier to do this while the shell is still grey). This was also attached with Kristal Klear and a skinny black strip of styrene added between the two panes afterwards. I'll probably go over the edges of the glass in black later, although that might also be a recipe for disaster.

You may not be able to see it here, but before the glass went in, I painted the drivers desk (this had to be done via the side windows) and I also made up a little angled box for the console that sits to the driver's left.

An issue with glazing the DM is that the actual 'glass' in the real thing is a lot smaller than the black painted bits, especially with the tiny side windows and the front emergency exit window. I've brightened up the shadows in a picture of the real thing to show this:

Anyway. As for the good end. The sides were installed per the above process but the front left open at this stage. Lewis has hinted that a better and far cleverer glazing solution might be on the way.

A volunteer was then called from a box of 1:120 unpainted figures that date from my TranzAlpine AG van exploits, and painted up with the current KiwiRail 'uniform' of an orange fleece/jacket with white reflectorised stripes, and a black golf shirt underneath. 

Unfortunately our man had to meet with an unfortunate accident (link nsfw) to fit behind the desk with his arms sitting above it, but the less said about that the better. Because of the tight spaces inside, to add salt to the literal wound, he then had contact glue smeared on his lower torso and hands in an undignified manner before being ruthlessly forced through the front window at the end of a pair of tweezers.

The printed long hood sides have also been laid on with some sort of tacky white glue. One of the yellow bits bothered me enough (a bit too fluro/green) that I overlaid it with the cab paint. I think this is the side visible in all three pics below.  

The cabside numbers came from some N Scale Microscale BNSF decal sheets and the white reflector strips are from a Southern Pacific set, cut into chunks. I've not put these along the sides in the hope that a set of handrails will mysteriously appear in my mailbox in a month's time. Until then, this project will go into stasis.