At this point, I'd reached almost the end of hacking, carving and sanding bit's off the 48xx body. I think in Iain Rice's original article, he uses a sentence like "at this point it looked just about ready for the scrap line"...
I wanted to see how bad the carving about was, and what flaws I had created which needed to be fixed. So the easiest way of doing this was to give the body a coat of primer, as a nice even coat to see the flaws.
I did this with my airbrush, in the spray booth. No fancy clamps or hooks here. For the majority of my spraying, I mount things on a block of scrap timber with some off-cuts of an old wire clothes hanger. There are a number of holes so I can vary the location. On a couple of the wires, I have fixed cheap crocodile clips so the model is held firmly, rather than blasted to the back of the spray booth.
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It's basically the no-cost version of a Tamiya paint stand:
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So using some pale grey enamel paint, I gave the body a quick whizz over. It first glance, it looked rather good:
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But the purpose of the exercise was to identfy flaws to clean up, so there were some scrapes on the tank tops and the cab sides where detail had been removed that needed some gentle sanding.
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This was done with one of the foam backed sanding pads, going carefully around the other detail.
More annoyingly, what it showed (and was not obvious because the original fittings were black coloured) was that details like the tank vents and fillers didn't fit properly. Inevitable, I suppose on a mass-produced RTR model.
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So my solution for this was to use some "gloop". This is the name that I and my childhood friends used to use for the plastic filler that we used to blend in the arms and legs of Airfix 1/32 model figures, or add detail or hise other moulding flaws. This is my little jar of "gloop".
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Basically, it is half a jar of Mek, with bits of waste sprue chucked into it, and stirred until they dissolve and it becomes a gloopy thick liquid plastic. It can then be applied with a cocktail stick, screwdriver, or even an old brush, to fill in gaps. It takes a couple of hours to dry, but then you have built-up plastic that you can cut, sand, carve, as normal.
So I poked it into place under the fittings to fill the gaps:
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And at the front of the side tanks where there was a gap - this is also a trick for the corner plates of open wagons, if the mouldings don't quite reach, and you need to sand a slight curve on the corner:
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And inside the body, where the separate mouldings didn't quite fit, and under the primer a gap was evident. This was done from the back of the gap, so the gloop could be splodged (another technical term) into place:
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And at this point, I was actually feeling quite pleased with myself - I was well on the way to the body rebuild. And then disaster struck!
Cheers
Paul
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