Balls of Cement - URC Sputnik Wagon

 DB says:

I received a care package from 3 Foot 6 models yesterday. 

There are some impressive items within it, and I'm pleased to say that the quality is superb. Lewis mentioned a few months back that he has changed up his processes and the results really show here. No strata! Flat surfaces! Straight edges! No sags! Even the resin seems slightly less brittle and a little more forgiving, unless you drop something onto concrete from a height that is...

But more on that in a moment.

Its been a while since I have 'made something' with wheels, so why not let 3'-6 do most of the work and I'll finish things off. 

A prototype that I've always wanted is a cement wagon or two. There were two main bogie tank styles - these spherical Sputnik URCs, and the UBCs that came with either spherical or flat sided tanks with more conical tops. These are appropriate from the late steam era through until the mid 1990s. 

Here is a URC laid up at Taita in the early 90s.

The 3-6 one, which I believe was designed up by Simon Lister, is a Sputnik type. So that's what I'm making, and handily I have the picture above. There are a few wagons preserved too:  https://www.nzrsr.co.nz - search for URC in class. One has a picture showing the piping on the other side. There is also one UBC of the other shape preserved. David Mac's rolling stock register is a great resource for remembering what older wagons looked like without having to go and see them.

The 3D print quality here is great. Despite these being spherical surfaces, there is no strata at all on this print, the tubs are smooth and completely free of facets, the flat surface of the wagon top is completely perfect. There is not even any warp in the sides or the truss rods, or in the width of the trusses. The only slight blemish is in one of the corners, but its so minor I'm not going to touch it. There is a slight ring around each of the four cement balls (in the top half). I'm not sure if this is intentional from the design or a slight printing defect but I gave them a quick ineffective rub with some fine sandpaper that must have last been used on something yellow.

The four lids were glued on top, as these are printed as separate parts. I needed to open up the holes for these slightly in two of the balls. 

Then I did my usual removal of coupling pockets and shortening the bogie mounting points so the wagon will sit lower.

About this stage I managed to drop the whole thing onto the concrete floor. I can never manage to hit the little carpet mat under me and am finding such fumbles are one of many perils of getting older. 

The terminus of the dropping motion all but snapped the frame in half and removed two of the balls. Bugger. Some glue had it back together in short order. I put some steel wire (my point rodding) under the wagon floor to keep things together and flat.

I then had the clever idea of enlarging the two central holes in the bottom to fit some chunky short steel screws into. This would add some much needed weight to the wagon. I very slowly and carefully drilled these out to the required size, being careful not to damage the truss rod cross braces. This took a while at very slow RPMs. After all that care, I realised I'd need to remove the cross pieces anyway to fit the screw heads. D'oh.

The cross pieces were replaced with some thin styrene strip. The above pic shows the underframe with its removals, additions and repairs.

Then the action moved topside. After a 'first coat' of painting, I added the two platforms between the sets of tanks out of some scribed wood that was lying on my desk, and some ladders which are Marks Model Works CB ladders, some of the most useful things you can buy. I've can used these on many models. If they were a little longer and I was a little smarter, I might have tried shaping them better and making the nice hoopy bits on the top. I could have used some brass wire here. Maybe I will. Nah, that's never going to happen. 

But some .020 Evergreen styrene rod made some pipes on the deck, and along the side that doesn't have the ladders. 

And then it was time for paint and weathering. The base wagon is flat black, and the tops Tamiya Royal Light Grey. Weathering was a little brown wash on the truss rods, and on the top some pale grey Vallejo Game Wash and white Jacquard Pinata Alcohol Ink wash, running from the top down, and concentrating on the top half of the spheres. A little rust was dabbed on in places too. I may go back with the white ink at some stage, but then again its a subtle effect and I will use these on trains at their 'early to mid-life'  - either 1960s steam or behind 1980s DJs. So before they got really scungy.

The wagon was shod with some Kato Japanese 'Taki' tank wagon bogies that were reviewed here a decade or more ago. I used these rather the usual than MicroTrains ones because I will be running this among four-wheeled wagons which have Rapido couplers, as do these bogies. These also have a longer wheelbase and slightly larger wheels than the MT ones.

Sometimes the manufacturers, Kato especially, make spare parts available when they rerun certain models, but usually in limited numbers. I put these bogies on my Hobbysearch Japan wish list quite a while ago, and also some bogies that might suit a 30 foot guards van. When they all briefly showed up as orderable recently, I snagged a few sets and they arrived a couple of days ago. As this is typed, I'm not sure how much they cost.

The final touch, done after these pictures were taken, was to spray a little Dullcote on. The mysterious 'rings' on the top quarter of the tanks show up a bit in the photos, but aren't that noticeable when you're staring at the wagon going by. The Dullcote may help too. The bendiness in the second to last pic is due to the phone wide angle/close up, not any printing problems! 

Other than waiting for things to set this was a pretty quick project, taking about two hours up until the weathering.  

The most tricky job with all these resin bogie wagon prints is getting the bogie mounting points to take screws. I'm not sure what the perfect answer is here as different bogie manufacturers require different sized screws or mounting techniques. Every screw I've tried on a 3D print has trouble biting into the tough resin, even if you enlarge the hole very generously. And sometimes the mounting piece will crack or break off while you are doing this, or you end up damaging your nicely detailed wagon. 

What worked with this URC, on the third attempt at enlarging the holes, was discovering that I own a small 'tap' which scours out a thread inside a drilled hole nicely. Its not quite the same thread pitch/type/size as the small bag of metal bogie holding screws that I've used forever (seriously, they need a straight screwdriver bit if anyone can remember those). But the tap will gently and efficiently remove enough material that the screws seem to find a home reasonably well. I must find a handle for it rather than using pliers. Perhaps it would fit into the handheld pin vice thing I use for small drills. So if you have this issue too, you might consider going to one of the local engineering firms with one of your screws and get the right sized tap. They aren't terribly expensive and will last a lifetime of making 3D bogie wagons up.

Its a cute wagon. Something quite different in a train that's for sure. Highly recommended.

The southern branch of MD will be away over the hills for the next week doing research in the field.  

Elmer Lane 21 - Roundhouse doors

DB excretes the following words: 

Roundhouse doors, what a pain. There are so many of them. Why did nobody tell me this before?!

It seems the wooden doors on the real thing were re-clad with galvanised corrugated iron around 1959-60. Moisture between the wooden framing and wooden cladding had rotted out the covering, and it was felt the corrugations would allow more air to circulate and dry things out. It was noted in that particular paper that the doors were almost always kept open, and that jives with every photo that I have seen of the roundhouse. Maybe they were closed up in big storms.  

In going through my styrene library, I found some cheap(er) JTT sheets that I bought quite a while ago to do the roundhouse... before I forgot I'd bought them. Out they came and became doors, of which I need about thirty.

I started framing these out as I had done for the Railcar Shed, referring to prototype pics of the roundhouse. I thought I had ample .010x.060 styrene strip for the framing, but before I knew it, I'd run out at the halfway mark. Dammit.

And yes, EB, that is the same gunked up styrene glue that you failed to extract anything from. It has since made the store shed, railcar shed, and all those other little offices and sheds.... And its still going strong on the doors! 

The two colour pictures of the depot that I keep looking at (Steam Inclined and 

xxxx

)  both have the doors that faded/pinked shade of red oxide that matches the window casement frames, so I attempted to mix up a batch of that, and my natural impatience had the doors that I had made painted, weathered and installed within about an hour, rather than doing the more sensible option of waiting until the other doors were built and doing them all in one go. 

The 'weathering' consisted of Tamiya panel line detail (a product that I'm falling out of love with) and a cool bottle of AK 'Starship wash' that I picked up while shopping on Paraparaumu's Rodeo Drive with the Head Druff last week. I used this on some of my recent batch of LCs and like it a lot. I have another of their 'interior washes' (for plane models) that I have used on a lot of things, including the roundhouse, but its a bit green-tinted for general use. On the plus side, it has all these little blobs of grit and mess in it that sit wonderfully on models. The starship wash is more a thin sooty wash, but I'm starting to like it. I wish these Mig/Ammo/AK products were more readily available in the provinces. Some flat varnish should have been applied to these doors, but I'd glued them in place before the weathering had completely set.

In other news, with the roundhouse lifted off the depot module and up to my eyes to attach the doors, I finally got around to filling in a few gaps between the casement windows on the outside segment walls with pre-painted reddy-pink styrene strip. 

And touching up a few missing bits of paint. I pre-painted a lot of that stripwood, cut it and glued it together to make the roundhouse, so there were a few imperfect joins that have just received a few blobs of paint. I also painted under the eaves of the raised top-hat roof at the end closest to the public, not that many people will get down that low, and if they do they'll see all sorts of other flaws.

'Soot' was applied above each stall door (weathering powder), and then the whole front of the shed was Dullcoted to keep that all in place.  I was careful not to get any Dullcote on the roof, or any more on the windows. 

The vertical strips were weathered and then the pairs of doors attached to them.

You might also (barely) see the results of using some black 'Vallejo Pigment FX', which is basically finely ground 'pastels/chalk', on the roundhouse tracks and around the donkey boiler room to represent coal dust, oil, grease and other miscellaneous black stuff. I've put that around the main loco in/out/storage tracks as well and reckon it looks ok as a first cut. On the roundhouse tracks I've gone the further step of 'fixing' it in place with Isopropyl alcohol. I suppose we will see tomorrow if it has stuck! * Without fixin's, it will eventually fall off or blow away, as its an incredibly fine powder and doesn't seem to have any adhesive properties, unlike the old Bragdon weathering powders used above the doors.

Presumably the next blog post will be the big reveal as to whether I waited to procure more strip of the matching size to finish the other doors, or just went ahead with the wrong size. Oooo! Cliffhanger ending!  **

* it did!

** spoiler alert, yes I did figure out the obvious alternative....

Little Coal Wagons - LCs 2

 DB continues from last time:

After painting the 10 new LCs brown, all manner of weathering was applied with various colours and shades of washes.  The intent being to make the 10 wagons look 'uniform but all different'. Some a little redder, a few a little yellower, a few a little greyer, a few a little blacker and so on. A few patches of fresh repair paint here and there, a few blobs of rust, and so on. Where the effects were a bit strong, I went back and mellowed it a little. I may do more of that, and will dullcote the whole lot to take any remaining sheen off.

Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that these Trackgang LC side and end castings are just superb. Fine, crisp detail without any casting flaws and no noticeable flash. Whoever made these masters deserves some quiet applause. Next time I'll get Russell to assemble them for me  :)

As a finishing touch, black patches for 'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' stencilling were added above the yellow number patches on the new LC wagons, most of my other 'nice' LCs (a few can remain in a general goods train or join the coal train if needed) and all my 'less-nice' old scungy castings. Those ugly old fellas are a bit sub-par, but smuggling a few of them into a long train to make up numbers might not be noticed. And they're a bit of NZ120 history! 

Annoyingly, I went through a few photo books after painting the black squares, and found that those  'Lyttelton Coal Traffic' patches are probably a bit 'late 80s' for my liking, and not all the wagons on the trains had them anyway! D'oh.  So I painted over the patches on two of the new wagons and some of the old ones with body colour brown. 

As I don't have the ability to print white on my Alps printer at the moment, I made up a simple spreadsheet like so and printed it on white decal paper with a laser printer: 

This came out better than expected, and once I had my production line process sorted, it was quite therapeutic to add these decals to about 20 wagons. If there was any white showing at the cut edges of the decals it was touched up with black paint later on.

Then a set of wagon numbers was made up for the new wagons (and a ton of my old wagons) and printed on clear decal sheet. Most of these are actually real TMS numbers, but some were made up - its not as if I can read them unaided anyway!

To clarify, I can read, I just can't see.

And as an aside, here is a comparison of various sample LC models I have, starting with three embarassing survivors of the old bog casting factory from about 1992. For some reason I've hung onto about 15 of these well-travelled models. The masters were made with plastic sides and stripwood for the bodyside ribs, as this was before Plastruct rods were freely available. The four (very subtle, barely visible) 'bumps' on the sides (for internal rope lashing on the prototypes) were blobs of PVA! I made two masters as the first RTV mould broke up after a while, and the second one had integral little rectangular knobs underneath to hold the Peco couplers down. Note the bottom model in the pic is on a stretched 10-foot Peco chassis, the middle one on a Fleishman chassis with unusual metal wheels, and the top one on the usual 15-foot Peco. The Flashfix bondo bog stuff was often hard to get into the nooks and crannies of the rubber moulds and bits have broken off in the subsequent 30 years. Rather than being a 'proper' two piece mould, I remember forcing triangular pieces of rubber down into the top of the poured Flashfix to 'remove' material from inside the walls where I wanted the coal to be. Fortunately, the bog was easy to carve as it went off, so one could further thin the walls and open up that space for the coal. As usual, the two foot rule (perhaps even extended to "nobody should look at these from less than a four foot radius), will be vigorously enforced...

Next up below are two similar but different models, and I'm not sure where they came from. Note that the lower one doesn't have the lashing bumps, and its a very crisp casting. They might have been purchased from Rod Murgatroyd, or Rhys, or was it Cross Creek that made a few tops? The one that I've added a ridgepole to is modelled as an LB, with spoked wheels stolen from a 10-foot Peco chassis. Technically its the only one that can legally have the round Peco axlebox, although some LCs received roller bearings in their later years.  The door detail is nicely done on this, but the oversized lumps on the sides are a bit hard to decal and paint around. Maybe I even made these myself. I must go back through the blog as a memory stirrer.

And then three-foot-six 3D prints, some of the details being more chunky in nature, but being one piece, they certainly go together easily! The top one has a strata line, and the lower one I've (incorrectly!) modified the upper doors. I must check these, but I think I removed some underframe/sill material to have the tops sit lower on the Peco chassis. 

And lastly six of the ten "new" Trackgang bodies on Peco chassis that this series of postings is about. Nice fine crisp detail. 

Next we will give them a shot of Dulcote, add a few little details and, plop some coal in.

Venting - TrackGang Ventilated Z van - 3 - wheels and weathering

 DB Says: Step away from the paintbrush.

So the 'wheels and couplers' dilemma resolved itself fairly quickly. The one set of assembled Trackgang 'old style/passenger' bogies supplied, were indeed used on Z roadsiders on the old Limited expresses, but this is before my timeframe. I might save them for a future 50 foot passenger car. The kit had an ideal style of bogie for my era, but the frame has been assembled way too wide, so the wheels won't sit in there (bottom-right below). I might need to find someone who has low-temp soldering apparatus that can thin it down.

In the meantime, I borrowed the set of Arnold/Rapido coupler-equipped GraFar bogies that I own (stolen off a slightly bent UK wagon) and used these on one wagon, as the couplers have almost-long-enough reach. 

On the other wagon, I stole a spring loaded Arnold/Rapido coupler from one of my horrible 1991-cast Lc highsiders and body mounted it, sticking it out a little so it can couple to the other Z with its short-reach couplers. With the spring it should be OK on curves. At the other end I attached a body-mounted MicroTrains, which will couple to the locos. The bogies on this one were from Kato Japanese tankcars, and stolen off another old NZ120 wagon - this place is starting to look like South Auckland with all these wagons up on blocks...

Some truss rods were attached - bent brass ones on the side and plastic rod in the middle. I should complete the angled parts of the middle ones, but I'm not sure they can be easily seen...

As for a final review of the Trackgang kits, I'd say four out of five. If it had a 3d printed roof and pre-assembled bogies it would easily score ten out of five. If you see any of these floating around TradeMe, snap them up.

But then some bad things happened. I've been accused of over-weathering things before. And with good reason:

I did somewhat go to town here. Usually my weathering strategy is: eeeeaaaasy does it...  oh, that's a bit strong, I'll go back and.... Oooo, now it's worse. 

Urrk. Ugly closeups. And the other sides:

Bonus:

I found my old XC master from ten or so years ago in a box of goodies and thought I might as well turn it into a third XC wagon.

A use for some Trackgang bits I didn't use from the Z kits is seen below, as the plasticard top is super light:

The finished wagon is top-right on the ventilated wagons 'family pictures' above. 

Venting - TrackGang Ventilated Z van - 2 - painting

DB was pondering with Mr Bätchelé de yong the other day: 

We came to the conclusion that the main obstacle of modelling progress is inertia: the tendency of objects at rest to stay at rest. The (positive) converse being that objects in motion tend to stay in motion.

I have a fear of soldering, and a fear of spray painting, among many other fears, so my Z class wagons have been stalled for more time than they have been moving forward. Yet after almost a week of over-thinking and worrying, I managed to prime the metal bodies with a can of Tamiya Surface Primer. Something I've never used before.

And by golly it's good. As this stuff contains chemicals known to cause cancer in the State of California (which is probably not what they mean, and besides, they even put this warning on cornflakes over there), I took it out into the garden and applied four or five very light coats instead of the usual one big lumpy one, which is always my default mode when spraying (cover, damn you, cover!). 

With the light sprays, the wagon bodies slowly turned grey and more importantly, all the detail was still visible and with no paint runs. Go me!

The stalks here were bits of dowel from the dollar shop used for Z scale bridge pylons the day before and the leftovers and offcuts were stuffed into a box. My, I think I'll save this Mighty Wagon Holding Apparatus for future sprayings.

Despite the natural desire for my moving objects to stay in motion, I allowed the primer a day to set and then put some white on the sides. This was a mix of some sort of Tamiya pure white acrylic, tinged with some grey/brown and some yellow/brown. This all came out a bit grey and dark for me so I applied (a lot) more white to the mix and overpainted. This was all done in vertical streaks to imbue a mild form of 'weathering' into the base, as the Zs that I saw were never ever white.

As an aside, I graduated from Humbrol enamels to Tamiya (and other) acrylics about 15 years ago. I liked how they set so quickly and could be thinned and cleaned up with relatively non-smelly water, isopropyl alcohol or thinner. They also seem to last longer without drying up in the tin. 

The one downside being that they have a very short working time, so if you're taking your time, they can start to blob up and peel off. A few years ago I discovered 'Tamiya Paint Retarder' and this is magic stuff, with a drop added to your mix giving you far more time to work. Yet it still sets quickly so you can still move onwards, ever in motion. My mixing trays are usually clear plastic covers from glue and the like (to the left here, with various shades of white to pick from)

As I wasn't sure where the roof join paint line would be, I overlapped the side colour onto the roof. This additional layer also helped fill any gaps between badly glued together parts. You might be able to make out some slightly different shades from the different layers. There is more brown in the ventilation grilles for example.

Then the roof was painted. I always remember this as a yellowy brown colour, but looking at the Cousins Brothers (Cuzzie Bro's) Pictorial Railways of New Zealand, it seems this was more of a chocolatey brown, so away I went. 

I was very careful doing the join with the white, and very uncareful around the roof ventilators, where a few holes needed to be blobbed up with paint. 

As a first step in weathering, I also added some Tamiya Panel Line Accent wash to the louvres (you can see this on the rearward wagon. More on weathering later, but for now, this thing needs trusses added underneath, and then decisions will need to be made on bogies and couplers. 

These will be in the '80s' train, and for ease of wagon mixing, this train will have the old style rapido couplers throughout (95% of my '80s' wagons do already). As these are the heaviest wagons I have, they will track nicely behind the locos, which have body-mounted Microtrains couplers.

I mentioned this earlier, but this is probably the nicest piece of NZ120 that you can't buy right now (as they don't seem available anymore from Trackgang). The sideframe detail just below the white body is great (see the first pic on the previous Z post), and the bodyside details sublime. Wrangling and fitting the roof was a pain, and I made my drilling mistakes with the roof vents (again, a one piece 3d printed roof would do wonders here). But these really are top shelf so far. 

Tamiya Weathering Master: Enter the Dragon

DB filthily, and somewhat erratically conveys:

Product inspiration

While at a hobby shop the other day, this item caught my eye.

Ohayou Gozaimasu, Weathering Master.

A quick chalky aside: I've always loved browsing through the Aladdin's Caves that are art supply stores, and in one, about 25 years ago, I happened to spot some Faber-Castell coloured chalks that might suffice as the 'weathering chalks' that I kept reading about in the overseas model mags.

Did they ever! I sanded these down to a dust with fine paper (the dry chalky pastels, not the waxy crayony ones), applied them with a brush and was blown away by how good they looked on my models and although over the past few years I've tended to rely more on acrylic washes, chalks have always produced great dust and soot effects for those of us not licensed to use airbrushes.

A few challenges with chalks. Firstly, raw chalk doesn't stay put. If you put it on a matt surface it sticks fairly well straight away, but in time, fingers will leave prints and brush it off. So... you can seal it down with Dullcote or some other overspray, but that often makes your chalks either go many shades darker than you expected, or disappear completely.

Bragdon Enterprises came up with a clever mix of chalks and some sort of adhesive, so that when you brush their stuff on its stays put without an overspray which solves that problem if you can get the stuff. I stumbled into a set of black and three rusty shades about 10 years ago and I think that will last my lifetime.

The next challenge with chalks is how to apply it over a large surface without it going 'blotchy' where you dab with your paintbrush...

Slip this attractive compact into your wife's purse and let her inner beauty shine with our new Autumn colour range: Deathly White, Gothic Mist and Whiff of Faeces 

But be that as it may... Lets put that chalky aside aside now: for there were two things that caught my eye with this new Tamiya offering. One was that it said "semi-soft" on the back, which was intriguing and sounded like it might be a little smooshy and ideal for the sooty messes around exhaust stacks that my normal chalks seem too thin to do well. Secondly, it comes with a kind of a sponge on a stick to apply it with. Probably like the make-up sponges that weathering gurus and women use to create tasty models.

So how does it work? In a word: incredible.

Well this isn't NZ120 but if you stand further away from your screen, or stare through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, it might look like it.

Calm down Gary, it's 1:64th. Never noticed that paint on the window before :(

They don't seem to require sealing and the shovel shaped applicator stick thingy works really well. You can pick up a light or heavy swipe of the stuff and use the pointy end for getting into tight spots or for thin streaks and the real bonus is the flatter faces, which are nicely shaped for covering larger areas with streaks or in a curricular motion with good control. I feel like I am reviewing a car. I think this will work well on things like NZ120 container roofs which are hard to do well without an airbrush.

Another aside: These have three colours per pack and there seem to be a few different packs. The one I selected has black, a milo-colored brown, and if you want those two useful colours, you'll also be lumbered with white. White? Who would ever use white to weather with?!

Just as I have been using 'Acrylic Gull Grey" as my go-to weathering wash for the past few years, look at what a sweet job the white did in 'sun bleaching' a few of the deep red side panels and roof of this ratty looking DE.

Phone camera adds 20 pounds

Tamiya Weathering Master. I think I'm in love.


p.s. just as I'm about to post this, I found this excellent product page on Tamiya's corner of the interweb. Anyone else use these products? I hadn't seen them before...