April Project Month - Parts4-6: Misc SOU/SCL Diesel Jobs

I forgot to get photos of these 3 projects before I left:

• SCL FT units (no photos)
• SOU F3 paint touch-ups (no photos)
• SOU SD9 (Of course MTH announces one as I finished this one...no photos)

My dad had bought an ABA set of ACL FT units.  Despite never having had them, he wanted them SCL.  I went ahead and used F3/F7 units as my guides.  I first removed all window material/port lenses for proper decal prep.  I carefully sanded off the ACL lettering and repainted the area with black paint.  After the glosscote, it is hard to tell that the area was ever touched.  I then added the SCL lettering, the SCL logo under the cab windows, and the SCL herald on the nose.  The only bad part is that the herald yellow does not match the yellow MTH chose.  Bummer.  Maybe a 5-6 hour due to the careful sanding of the ACL lettering, to ensure nothing else was removed.




My dad had some MTH F3 units that had some paint scratches on the edges of the green on the units.  The tru-color green is a good match.  A quick little hour job spread over two or three passes.  I would suggest getting the flat-paintable version, as it did go on a little glossier than the existing paint, but luckily it was just small paint nicks and passable.




The SOU SD9 was a complete repaint from a pretty old Protosound2 C&O unit.  No super-detailing at all.  These units are too crude to warrant any more than a repaint job from me IMHO.  The paint on these was on good.  I wish I had a sandblaster for this particular one, but oh well.  Lots of time in the 91% isopropyl and a toothbrush got the job done.  The experiment of gloss black was tried on this guy too, but won't do that again.  I looked at pictures and decided to use unit 204W as my guide. (Which is good in case my dad wants to get the newly catalogued 202 unit.) 

Hardest part on this one is the imitation aluminum striping.  I noticed the new microscale decal sets do not use the striping, but rather just giving you the gold stripes and force you to paint the imitation aluminum stripes.  Probably a good idea, and will pick up tru-color for that.  Laying the stripes is a real PITA because there are louvers and door handles that make it hard to lay the decals, requiring lots of layers of microsol, and poking with an X-acto knife.  Where the decal didn't lay right, I had some paint that I was able to use to fix any problems in the stripe.  Final product came out well. I don't know the hour estimate, but it was a lot due to the paint stripping and the stripe application. Probably 10 hours.

April Project Month - Part3: SCL SD45 2004

As already discussed in my blog, I had done up units 2000 and 2010 for my dad previously.  I located and got my dad unit 2004 as a surprise.  I was able to match the weathering exactly, despite not writing down what I used.  I also fixed the numberboards and made sure to paint the LEDs with tamiya translucent orange to get rid of the bright-white LEDs that are not prototypical for the 1970s.

Some photos of the weathering job, where the shells are pan pasteled lightly, and the underframe area has typical roadgrime as shown in pictures.  I left the snowplow off this one, but SCL did run these with snowplows in winter time.

This time around, I also noticed that MTH totally botched the font of SCL on the side of the units.  Oh well.  Not fixing that one.

April Project Month - Part2: SCL Passenger Cars

This project, while listed as Part 2, took up the bulk of my time, probably some 40+ hours when it was all said and done.  It was supposed to be a simple repainting of the lettering boards, but then there were ACI plates and SCL heralds that had to be put directly on the car bodies, so it required full-on taking everything apart to do the proper prep work to put on the Microscale decals. Things worth doing are worth doing right.  No shortcuts.

Then while apart, I figured if I was going to do them right, I might as well do the interiors.  The colors are inspired off a handful of photos from the Morning Sun ACL Color Guide.  These cars are "ex-ACL" after all.  The interior photos of SCL cars that exist that I am aware of did not show these cars anyways.  The "ex-ACL" is in quotes, since these cars are generic car bodies that MTH slathers on any old paint scheme and do not faithfully represent the prototype cars that really existed. With that being said, I probably put upwards of 10 hours in carefully trimming off the skirts with first a dremel, and then X-acto knives. It's a spotting feature, so had to be done.

These cars were made in 2015 and I must say that MTH quality has gone far up since the first set of cars I went inside some 10 or so years ago.  The people were glued in extremely well, as were the window strips.  The tooling enhancements are noticeable on the construction of the cars on the inside too. Each car had a different set of figures that MTH makes.  Smart move.

I labeled every car and interior with painters tape.  I took photos of each car before taking out the figures, to know exactly how to put them back in each car. One will even see that I managed to put keil-line dishes on 10 of the tables in the dining car.  MTH interiors are not to scale.  The dishes take up too much space on the table, but are good enough for the effect from looking outside.

I used .02" white styrene cut down to model the window shades pulled at different heights.  I knew where the figures sat, so I made sure the shades were up to see the figures. I used rubber cement to hold them in place.This ensures the window-strip material doesn't craze.  I can't speak for the longevity of how well they will hold the shades over the next decades.

The OBS got some special treatment.  I noticed in pictures that the OBS rear windows had blinds.  I printed out extremely thin vertical green strips (using MS Paint) on paper, cut them out, glued the halves together with white glue (to model both sides), and glued those in with rubber cement. I created a custom decal for the drumhead.  I also took off the 3R coupler on the rear truck, and used the existing kadee-pad to add a Kadee clone made by Weaver to the end of the OBS.

I think the only thing left I could have really done, was upgrade the lighting to flicker-free LEDs, but that's enough work for now.

Here's the Photo Essay...first up, the complete train:

Baggage: SCL 5002

Coach: SCL 5267

Coach: SCL 5464

Coach: SCL 5480

Sleeper: SCL Venice

Diner: SCL 5951

OBS: SCL 5844

 Some Work to get to the finished product:

 I airbrushed the seats first.

 Masked off the painted seats to then do most of the floor by airbrush.  Then follow up with brush.

Letterboards on their own paint board.

 This is what it looks like to take apart a whole set of cars, windows and everything in order.  Made it easier to put them back where they came from.

 I forgot the height, but I cut a bunch of strips from one sheet of .02" styrene.

 Easy to bend and rip apart.  Then file down the edges. Cut for different heights b/t windows.

 OBS blinds making in process.  Do not add glue directly to paper, drag strip across a pond of glue.

 Completed Interiors.

 Keil Line Dishes Painted.

 The ruler might be for exageration, since the fluting made it easy to line up the lettering boards.

 Some cut-off skirting done by X-acto knife only.

Roster Shots:

Some other various shots:

Dining Car:

The Observation Car:
 

April Project Month - Part1: SCL RS3 1161

Over the month of April, I scrapped together as much time as I could to finish out several 3R O gauge projects for my dad. I had some of his stuff in my house for 2-3 years and hadn't had a chance to work on it.  I put everything aside to get these out of my basement.

This is the first of several posts.  He runs 3R O gauge trains, in SCL, SOU, NYC, and various other roads. I finished out several things...ironically they were all made by MTH.
1. SCL RS3
2. SCL Passenger Cars
3. SCL SD45 Modifications/Weathering
4. SCL FT units (no photos)
5. SOU F3 paint touch-ups (no photos)
6. SOU SD9 (Of course MTH announces one as I finished this one...no photos)
7. SCL RPO - Still in progress.

The model itself is an MTH Protosound2 RS3 and was painted UP.

This SCL RS3 is a pure repaint and weathering job, nothing more. There was no effort on this one to do any sort of super-detailing (minus the addition of number boards on the ends), etc. However, this one closely resembles the prototype, including the horns.

I used this to try a few things. One being the use of Testor's rattle cans to lay on the semi-gloss black paint.  I won't ever do it again.  The paint goes on too thick, so I will forevermore use only airbrushes on anything that touches the rails.  Buildings are another story. I also learned that the gloss spray paint wasn't worth it, and that I needed to gloss-cote anyways, so flat black is fine as a base coat. I also learned that Testors gloss lacquer can easily come off Testors gloss enamel.  They are not compatible.  Don't do it.

Weathering is by airbrush, drybrush, and pan pastels.  This is a very basic job...maybe 30 minutes worth, trying to match photos I had.

The interior is a photo my dad uses for these types of engines.  Also an MTH engineer figure was heavily mutilated to fit into the cab. It was so time-consuming, the fireman side only has the photo glued to the motor-shield.

I have been working on a temporary photobooth of sorts on my new workbench...however I really need to work on my lighting as you will see.  I have a diorama planned to replace this...but that will take time.

As a side note, good luck finding SCL locomotive decals.  I think I dried up the last pond.

Enjoy.

Joe I's 2R O-Scale PRR Layout

John Dunn and Rich Yoder presented me the opportunity to go see an amazing 2R layout one night after the York TCA Show.

I had seen Joe before at shows, but never knew who he is or what he modeled.  I must say the man is an amazing modeler, extremely sharp, and knows a lot about the history of everything he models on his layout.  It doesn't hurt that he used to be a former tower operator for many years.

I was very impressed.  He was extremely generous with his time and his knowledge.  I learned a lot and hope to incorporate some of the skills he said he used into some future projects.  He is the first to make me think using brick paper is okay.

I had permission to take photos.  He is very humble, not thinking his layout was magazine-worthy, but a magazine should definitely look into getting his story into print, to engrave his work into "stone".

Also something of interesting note...he likes it simple...so everything is straight DC.

I took a million photos.  Blogger isn't great about how it orders the photos when it inserts them in a post...so I will just post them all...and they may be out of order thanks to Google Blogger.  Not worth my time to fix it.