Phil's Workbench

Well, I thought I might as well finish the week by trying to recreate the painting from the front of the Ruston book. To do this I set up the Melbridge Box Company and posed the little 48DS locomotive with a handy wagon.

The cruel enlargement shows up the deficiencies of my "Ruston" script. I used the same pen as for the lining but the paint was runnier and required a lot more tidying up with a green loaded brush. A better, or at least more patient, painter would have re-done it using a fresh tinlet. If it's tried that I suspect the build up of base colour would have considerable after all the attempts...

Behind the loco, the wagon is a wooden bodies open fitted with coke rails (these allow a greater volume of coke to be loaded as it's lighter than the coal the wagon was designed for) which towers over the tiny engine. A private owner wagon, the paint has worn away and BR aren't going to bother to give it another coat, they just slapped some black patches where the new numbers need to go and let it eek it's last few years out on the network.

Before all this work, the little 48DS locomotive was a rather uninspiring black with rusty bits. My intention was to go all industrial and paint it green. Much prettier.

Humbrol 150, Forest Green, looked a good match for Jonathan Clay's lovely watercolour. Contrasting with the red buffer beams it looks fabulous. Industrial stuff was always painted green anyway so the colour is a bit of a no-brainer.

The problem was that Ruston lined out it's locos so I was going to have to give this a go. The job seemed more suited to the Bob Moore Lining pen than a bow pen. The former comes with spaces that attach to the nib allowing the line to follow edges. This took a bit of tweaking but once going I quickly seemed to be getting the hang of it.

Once most of the lines were in place I joined them up following a ruler, or even freehand. Corners were blobbed in.

The finishing touches were to tidy everything up with a small brush and green paint. Corners were rounded this way and wobbly lines straightened. This is the bit that we all assume professional painters don't do, all lines being perfect first time. Truth is they do fiddle and push paint around. Probably not as much as bodgers like me but it happens all the same.

Having dreaded doing this job I found myself getting quite into it. OK, the results are not perfect but they are good enough for me and that's what matters. As I always say, it's my toy train and I'll so that's all I care about.

(And yes it is wonky on the chassis. I need to sort this out next)

One of the most notable omissions from the Tag Models kit was the ironwork dangling from the buffer beam. Presumably this is to protect the underframe from detritus on the track but for the model it's more important visually as it provides both height and detail to an otherwise blank area. I made the girders up from brass angle although bending some sheet wouldn't have been too bad as long as the fold had been scored properly to aid the bending.

Up to this point all the soldering had been carried out with the trusty Antex iron but for the buffers I decided the RSU would be better bet. The overlays on the buffer beams mentioned yesterday had covered the mounting holes and rather than re-drill these I simply removed the pips from the buffer shanks, tinned the ends and fixed them with the RSU. A little adjustment was required, something I'd have avoided if I'd measured rather than working by eye, and there we had it. The ends of the loco looked like the ones in the painting I was following.

With the metalwork finished it could move on to plastic fiddly bits. The back of the bufferbeams were turned into a C-girder formation with the addition of a few scraps of microstrip. New sandboxes from square rod and more offcuts of thin sheet appeared. These can just be seen in some of the pictures but I couldn't find a clear photo. They are square and about this height. Maybe slightly fatter but I can't be sure and these look OK.

Finally a rear light can from some of those leftover moldings stored in a little drawer to come in useful "some day". At last this day has arrived. Heaven knows what this was once upon a time but now it's a light so the driver can see what he's reversing in to.

Once all the parts of the little 48DS locomotive were cleaned up, the task of putting them back together could start.

First up, the cab was rebuilt, taking care to put the sides on the correct way around this time. My previous mistake was easy to make, conventional cabs have the entrance at the rear so the driver can lean on the "window" at the front. on a tiny diesel this would make getting in and out difficult. The driver is sat at the back and can swing his legs to the side to slide out with the correct configuration.

The work highlighted the problems faced assembling a second hand etched brass kit. During my last attempt I'd obviously had some issues with the fit, probably caused by my inexperience/incompetence and had filed the ends a bit. Thus now I found it impossible to get a perfectly square box as the sides were fractionally different in length. This doesn't show on the finished model but frustrated me for a little while.

One thing I have been able to improve on is the roof. Those cab sides aren't very tall and so the roof has to be bent very tightly to fill the gap. Previously I'd made good the space with scrap etch. This time I nailed it by some vicious metal wrangling.

With this done, detailing started. The buffer beam appears to have an overlay in the picture and so I made one from thin brass sheet. The same material was used for replacement cab steps since I'd lost the kit originals at some point. At the same time a 1mm strip was added to the bottom of the sideframes. Plastic sheet would have worked as well but I fancied practising my metalwork and so soldered the sheet - with a proper iron too, no easy RSU work for me !

After it's trip to the paint stripper, the little model locomotive was looking pretty sorry for itself. This wasn't the end of it's trials however, those cab sides were still on back to front so they needed to come off too.

I suppose I could have used an electric soldering iron to melt the joints but a gas torch seemed a gentler option. I know that might seem odd, but I find that you can pile heat into the solder faster so it melts before the temperature of the surrounding brass has gone up by much. Also, the inside of the loco was still a bit painty which would have affected the heat transfer from the iron.

Plan A was just to remove the roof and sides. Then I noticed that the back was a bit lose. Since it had a row of poorly punched rivets I decided that it ought to come off too so I could use the rivet punch. Which lead to the front coming off as well for the same reason - we want the model to be a consistent standard all over don't we ?

After all this hot action it was just left for me to scrape, file and finally burnish the remaining solder from the parts. Next week I can start putting things back together.

First up for the fettling of this little model locomotive is to get all the old paint off it. Since my imagination had only stretched to a spray of black followed by a hint of weathering, this wasn't any loss.

After removing the SPUD and driver figure, the model was dunked in a pot of Nitromors. Almost immediately, the surface started to bubble and leave the brass. 5 minutes later I was cleaning it off under a running tap and looking at shiny metal.

It's at this point when I realised just how much plastic detailing I'd carried out. The bottoms of all the sides were left with the remains of microstrip. Behind the buffer beam a girder melted, on the cab sides the numberplate was not happy and even the rain strips were on their way out.

Maybe I'll replace some of this with metal detail but possibly not. After all, I don't intend to dunk it in the paint stripper again in a hurry !

I'm not one for updating old models. Once I've finished a project, it tends to stay finished unless a bit of routine maintainance is called for. Models are built to the best standard I can manage and then left alone. There are a few tucked away that probably could do with a bit of attention rather than being hidden but then I've so many nice new things to do it never seems to happen.

However, there is one model that I'm less than proud of and feel the need to fettle. It's my smallest locomotive, a Ruston 48DS.

This tiny model loco is a TAG Models etched brass kit sitting on top of a Tenshodo SPUD. It's runs, much tot he surprise of people looking at the layout, and thanks to every nook & cranny being filled with lead, pretty well too.

But, there are problems. Firstly, the cab sides are on back to front. I don't know how I managed this but I did. The biggest spur was the purchase of David Halls excellent book on the locos years ago. The beautiful watercolour on the front made me realise how poor a model I'd built.

So, it is now time to turn the caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. Or at least make this 48DS a rather prettier example.

One of the smallest locomotives in my fleet is this little Ruston 48DS. Built from an etched brass kit produced by TAG models many years ago, the body just fits over a Tenshodo SPUD.

Although the model was sold as suitable for a SPUD, the instructions only seemed interested in using the Bachmann "Gandy Dancer" as a power unit. Therefore I had to improvise, fortunately not too difficult in this case. I think in this case I ended up with the better unit. Gandy dancers are nice and ingenious but pretty much have two speed settings - stop and go.

Using the SPUD allows the tiny bonnet to be filled with lead in an effort to give the thing some weight. The cab too has heavyweight innards. Despite this I wish I'd been able to get my hands on some uranium or other heavy metal !

When I built the model I obviously wasn't paying attention properly as the eagle eyed will notice that the sides are the wrong way round. The doorway should be towards the front !

One day I will fix this. I've never been one for revisiting old models and reworking them, preferring to start from scratch. The 48DS was never my finest hour though and I do have a very nice drawing on the front of a book that shows the real thing in glorious green with a bit more detail. While this was a simple kit, in my enthusiasm to build it (I was young dear reader) it didn't get the attention it deserved.

There are also some very nice photos on the web.

In fact I've enjoyed these as much for the industrial background scenery as for the locomotive ! I reckon that these ought to give anyone contemplating a micro layout some food for thought. A locomotive like this, a couple of wagons and a shoebox - how much more space do you need ?