DX in Half a Day 5: Warning: takes more than half a day

DB says (yes I'm still alive): I was far too busy running a B&B service for visiting members of the Diesel Traction Group and their wives this weekend to do much modelling. I could have inserted a bunch of other excuses in there to cover the lull since my last post, but that is by far and away the most exotic sounding.

The prototype insta-DX has been making slow and occasional, yet steady strides towards completion and has now received some tentative dabs of paint in anticipation of handrails. Putting my awful painting aside, actually lets not, as this KR1 scheme is a tricky one for us luddite brushpainters... I score a subtle horizontal line with a knife along the longish stretch of long hood using a plasticard 'ruler' (the colour separation is also luckily at the top of the rear grills at the back of the long hood) and then 'paint by numbers' using that, and an eyeball, as a guide. Hard to avoid brush marks with the short brush runs and unfortunately if you thin the paint much it will run up the panel lines.Using laser-assisted bits, or 'scratch-aids', is definitely the way to go when building a diesel (or a 44 foot car, or a Z wagon, and the list goes on). Its hard to beat the panel detail - straighter and squarer than Michael Cera yet orders-of-magnitude more convincing. And look at the cab windows. And you can glue it and cut it and drill it and paint it just like styrene: because it's styrene. The nose came out fairly well too - this was resin cast from a plasticard master as were the ducts, headlights, roof sandboxes and rear end.
More as time permits...