Only CE CEs are tasting like theees! - 2

 DB says: Instead of "working" today as intended, I ended up being distracted for most of the afternoon by the CEs.

The previous night, I applied a little paint with an airbrush, then started thinking about the distinctive 'signage'.

Halfway through that thinking, I figured the bogies should be applied, as doing that at the end might upset the delicate signs. Good job too, as after the holes were drilled and screws were screwed, the whole thing sat up too high, and three wagons in, I came to the inevitable conclusion that "this will not do". There's nothing that makes a model look more toylike. 

So bogies came off and it was out with the dremel sanding drum and knife to lower the bogie mounting points almost a mm and to make more clearance in the underframe for the wheels to swivel.

After re-attaching the bogies (I use self tapping metal screws as they tend to be easy to find in small sizes at engineering shops) things looked far better.

As my decal printer's Windows XP computer is on the blink, I wondered about other ways of attaching signage, especially the distinctive 'this way to unload' arrows.  I doodled a design up in PowerPoint, printed it out in plain laser paper and coloured it in with a yellow marker. This was later joined by wagon numbers for the CEs and also for my old CBs and CWs. Paper stuck on with PVA is neither fancy nor high tech, but its the impression that counts, and this isn't completely terrible. The yellow shade could be redder, but that might be fixable later.

Then I found some white decal paper  - soon to be cut into strips - some plain white, some with red stripes. These are for the reflectorised strips at the bottom of the wagon

Ta-da, with signage:

There should be one more arrangement of plain white stripes in the shape of an arrow, but I'm not sure my OCD can be bothered.

A real pain was that the Crayola red obviously isn't waterproof, so the first dozen stripey bits lost most of their red in the water dish. I learned to carefully place them 'on' the water, and carefully retrieve them with tweezers without getting them wet. Then waiting until the retrieved pieces separated and could be applied. That all took some time, as I had 24 of the red stripey bits to do in addition to the sixteen plain white strips which went on quite quickly. 

Plug Of The Day is for that Tamiya decal cement I bought a while back for the reversed DSJ fern. It's subsequently been used for sticking down a decal-side of one of my RFL wagons that had curled away from the plastic container, and now for these fiddly little side stripes with the red angles, some of which kept curling off the wagon until they were glued down. Unsurprisingly, putting decals onto a gritty finish isn't a great mix. And this glue didn't seem to upset the red marker either, but has ebnough tack to work quickly, and is thin enough to get behind decals. A nice find.