Sunday, March 19, 2006
Class 33/1 Ups and Downs
The class 33/1 conversion is now complete. Well, more or less.
The conversion kit is very simple, if a little fiddly. It consists of two replacement ends for the Farish 33, an etch with pipe details and some replacement headcodes.
All you do is: remove the old ends and extract the glazing; drill holes in the new ends for the pipes; paint the ends and an extra glazing bar in the windows (which is missing from the Farish original); attach the pipework (the fiddly bit); paint the pipes; and (if you want) change the headcodes.
It was my first experience of painting a model and turned out much better than I’d expected. I even managed to paint the handrails silver without getting paint everywhere.
But now for the downs I mentioned in the title.
The model I’m converting is painted in NSE livery, and I want to convert it to banger blue. I had some paint stripper from Expotools and tests inside the shell showed it appeared to be safe on the plastic. Applying it to the outside of the shell stripped the paint fairly well, but when I used some Cif cleaner and started scrubbing the paint off with an old toothbrush the brush started digging into the surface of the plastic. Ouch.
I assume the stripper had softened the plastic enough for the toothbrush to gouge into it, but not done enough damage to show up in my test.
I’ll have to obtain another body and have a go with either acetone (nail varnish remover) or isoropyl acohol, both of which seem to be recommended for paint stripping on Farish models.
The problem left me feeling pretty down at first, but one of the best ways to learn is by making mistakes. I just hope for better things on the next try.
And the nice paint job on the new ends left me eager to make a start painting some wagon kits I made up last year. I’ll post some pictures later, but the results so far are looking rather good.