Hopefully though I'll get to Warley again this weekend. I have been known to forget the show is on before now.
I promised myself that I would get the signal box more or less finished before then, so here it is.
As usual things that looked OK at one stage have managed to warp, shift, unglue and generally mess themselves around behind my back.
The guttering got twisted when I fixed the roof down, I'm glad to say that overnight it has sprung back into shape. I do like the Ratio product.
I really must straighten the fencing, which still isn't glued down and blend in the bridge. Under natural light the stonework has some nice subtle colouring but it disappears under any artificial light. It needs be a bit browner anyway. The Glue 'n' Glaze in the windows of the AEC seems to have gone a bit matt as well. The finials need another coat of paint. The stove chimney is taller than it appears here, but rechecking photos should still be a lot taller.
Retrofitting the Wills point rodding wasn't easy but I know how to do it better the next time. I must straighten that FPL cover. The combination of the square Wills rodding and the round MSE doesn't look right and I might still replace the MSE with Wills for consistency. The one Wills component that I found jarringly overscale visually are the curved cranks. It is pity some signal pulleys aren't included. I've struggled with the etched versions on the market and would love to know of some alternatives.
Still I'm generally happier with it than I was earlier this week. Guttering, finials, and the safety bar in front of the windows have all improved it, I think.
All the above are mobile phone pictures so they do distort quite a few things. In the flesh the arrangement of the weighbridge and the box works better, with the weighbridge providing a clear foreground and the box snapping into the background.
This shot has a more natural perspective. I'noticed when I took this that I'd forgotten to put the tree back in. I took it out allow so I could work on the signal box area. Having now put it back in again I've realized it is another of those individual elements that have a big impact on the composition of such a small scene.
I don't need to mention that none of the interior is visible, do I?
James you are almost as bad as me for finding fault with your modelling ! Despite those outstanding jobs that need doing, I'm sure we all have a similar list and the distortion of the photos caused by your phone I think you have a nice little scene there. In fact rather than go to the Warley show which is my idea of hell I would rather stay at home completing the model ;-)
ReplyDeleteI agree with your comments about the overscale Wills curved cranks and am hopeful of filing my own down.
Enjoy the show.
Geoff
Thanks Geoff. I managed to get some of them done at lunch time. The stonework now looks different, though I'm not sure it looks better yet. It doesn't help that after looking really really hard at photos of the real thing I noticed a couple of key mistakes.
DeleteI stopped going to Warley for years because it ceased to be fun. These days though it seems OK if you are clever about timing your route around to avoid the stupid crushes. I finally got hold of a non-running Airfix 14XX so I have a little shopping list. 5803/6/12 are quoted by Lloyd as having worked on the TVR,