A tad more progress with an equitable amount of frustration which seems to accompany my spraying these days.
I snatched at a modeling window this afternoon and decided to add a touch of weathering to the signal arms prior to mounting.
A suitable shade of grime was mixed (Tamiya again to avoid frustration, or so I thought) from red brown and black. Annoyingly it stuttered and splattered despite my best attempts at preventing the paint from atomising in the nozzle. Removing the mix, I stripped down the gun once more and poked around with the wirey brushes and stuff that are included in the box. I also removed the tiny, dull metal thing that sits between the nozzle cover and the needle with the spanner provided to let it soak awhile in the alcohol filled lid of its container, only - being a rotten shot! - I missed and it bounced agonisingly slowly off the glass topped table I was using in the garden and disappeared into the abyss which is the grey coloured resin path beneath. I searched in vain for at least half an hour which I knew would be pointless from the start as thing isn’t much bigger the size of a small anorexic ant.
Letting out a deep sigh, I just left everything where it was and retired for a brew to get my head together.
Returning I made a second token and fruitless search for the elusive part before cleaning and reassembling the redundant gun, resigned to ordering a spare part at some time in the future……if I ever get round to it.
Fortunately, I’ve a spare air gun donated by a kind relative a couple of years ago, replete with compressor, hose and attachments so out thry came, but as these things are pretty standard, I just used my own accessories and compressor to save messing round. Then I filled the cup with the paint mix I’d saved and carried on. But nothing happened…..apart from s9ne bubbling in the cup. This is a clear sign if a blockage. Realising it hadn’t been used/cleaned in quite a while, I took a chance and introduced a tad more thinners. The bubbling remained and rose even higher up the cup whereupon on reaching the brim, a giant bubble burst and coated me………….
The air was blue!
Removing the paint mix once again, and returning it to the mixing jar, I stripped the darned thing down and scrubbed and poked every orifice before reassembling and trying again. More bubbles and nothing out of the nozzle. Suspecting for whatever reason that the need,e might be at fault, I stripped down the gun once more and replaced it with the one from my own redundant one. Cutting a long story short, it worked!
So, to the pictures of the arms:
The fronts are only slightly soiled to give the impression that they’re ‘maintained’ but beginning to become care worn as the station and its environs is soon to become abandoned:
The rears, less so:
This evening, I decided to address the handrails by placing them on the bracket where they’ll eventually sit, to work out where the bends would need to be made and where to cut them to length. This was fraught as they’re so frail, but thankfully they and I survived the ordeal.
Here they are (and the rear rails) after having been primed with acid etch:
I returned them to my indoor workshop whereupon I realised I’d forgotten to flatten the ends of those on the landing section.
I’ll sort this hopefully over the next couple of days.
Railway modelling, hey?
Thanks for looking in.
jonte
Pleased to read that you avoided the same outcome with your similar incident. Still, there are benefits to working outdoors although I’m busy keeping an eye to the weather of late with our damp instances and overcast skys that drop the odd drop or two of rain, always just as I’m getting into the swing of spraying.
! Keep up the good work, old friend - you are doing splendidly in producing what I know will be fine signals..
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