Modeling: 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.

Modeling: 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.

Modeling: 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:
 

Modeling: 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.

Modeling: First Weathering Job in New House - MTH SCL SD45's

My dad came to do some work on my house.  In return I weathered his new MTH SCL SD45 units and SCL caboose.

Quick Reviews:

The MTH caboose, after you look past the poor-looking trucks (they have used this for over a decade), are rather nice.  They did a pretty good job on this one, but are missing a lot of the finer small text that would have been along the sill, etc.  The MTH SD45's are really good plastic models...however MTH's paint job is rather atrocious, but my dad wanted to keep them anyway.  I would have returned them to make a point to MTH to step up their QA. If they don't have the expertise to do it themselves, they need to borrow modelers that care to review their pilot samples, etc.

MTH screwed up:

• the font of the numbers on the numberboards
• the size of the numbers on the side of the cab
• the spacing of the yellow stripes (which I think led to the cab number size problem)
• the headlight housing being silver...this may be true for one or two units, but most photos I see in the early 1970's are BLACK
• Incorrect horn, leaving the modeler to dish out $16 to build a Des Plaines Hobbies brass kit

MTH got right:

• Shades of black, silver, and yellow
• overall body accuracy
• additional MU box located above the pilots

Onto the weathering...

I weathered the trucks/pilots/fuel tanks with an airbrush and pan pastels.  My dad wanted lighter bodies, so I pan pasteled the bodies all over with light tan color as per prototype photo's found online. These photo's also showed that these units had plows on the front, so I weathered the plows and added them on when I was done. Yes, the numberboards are missing.  More on that below.

The caboose got roughly the same color treatment along the sill, underframe, trucks, and couplers.  I did paint the air hose glad hands and angle cocks silver. I painted all wheelfaces roof brown.

As a side note, I did adjust the camera light sensitivity to make it easier to see the pan pastel dusting on the shells.  Weathering is more subtle IRL.

(And I will remind non-blog users - clicking images results in hi-res photos)

Group Shot

 

 Front Angle Shot

 Side Angle Shot

 Caboose Shot

My makeshift spray booth...

Fixing the cab numbers is more work than its worth, considering I'd probably have to repaint each locomotive entirely to make it harder to tell that I changed the numbers. It may have resulted in redoing the yellow striping too.  The numberboards are much easier to fix, but took longer to do, so I mailed them to my dad after he had left.  Luckily the microscale numbers fit the numberboards.  They do, however, have to be cut out individually and put into place as the microscale spacing is not correct as is (per prototype photo).

 Just some modeling in action: Individually cut numbers. Sanded off numberboards, which were then repainted with a thin coat of white and glosscoted.  See the arrows? The back of the boards have angled plastic so that they fit in a specific way.  I had to keep track of this to make sure the numbers went on correctly so when put back into the shell, they remain rightside up.

 

 Note 1: There are two sizes of numberboards, one for the front and one for the rear.  I didn't realize this until I decaled the first one and used it as a template to do the second one and saw the slight size difference.  

Note 2: Also apparently never take a macro photo of microscale decals...you can see all of the microscopic flaws that we cannot see easily with our eyes at even the 1" distance. 

Note 3: Picture is before final glosscote layer after decal placement, thus easy to see decal lines.

Here is how the prototype, MTH, and my numberboards compare. MTH needs better quality control.  This is pretty ridiculous. They used the same sad front on my Southern F7s from a few years ago too. It appears they just don't care anymore.

Modeling: SCL U36B 1765

Here's a unit I finished over the summer - Seaboard Coast Line 1765.  With the help of online photos and the SCL yahoo group, I was able to figure out the prototypical horn and antenna placement. 

The firecracker antenna is a custom finishes FCA and the horn is a Leslie 5-chime (the exact part name escapes me) brass kit from Des Plaines Hobbies.  I positioned the chimes in the right directions as well.

The original unit was a U33C.  It was kitbashed into a U36B by shortening the unit and installing P&D blomberg trucks.  Also, one of the doors was opened on the side and the pilots were fixed with new handrails.  This work was done by an individual from Castle Hayne, NC.  He originally made this a SBD unit and all I did was fix the patch work he did on the windows by installing new windows, fixing the front headlight, adding the prototype details, and repainting into SCL Bumblebee scheme.

Weathering was done with an airbrush to match the photo I had of this unit in March 1971.

Don't forget - Click on each photo to see the Hi-Res version.