A happy new year to everyone!
Over the xmas break I finally managed to get back into the swing of modelling. No monumental leaps were made, but a little bit of progress was achieved and this was definitely needed to reignite some flagging motivation! The Charlton layout was packed up before the xmas break and it requires a weekend of effort to finish off a lot of little nagging areas of the layout. This is on the to do list for February - so until then I am going to work on completing a few pieces of rolling stock.
So I picked up the Dapol Class 122 I had started some while ago and made an attempt to get this finished off. The original problem with this project, was the application of an initial all over body wash of weathered black and frame dirt, diluted with Humbrol thinners. For some reason, this attacked the Dapol paint job, and quite frankly made a right mess of the body shell....be warned!
The body shell, showing the faded paint job, after a weathering wash, thinned with Humbrol thinnners.
I subsequently tried to blend this paint job together, using some shades of faded rail blue and weathering to disguise this. The end result was a body shell that was a lot more heavily weathered than I originally intended. Whilst not a disaster, it is not quite how I envisioned the DMU turning out.
The finished body shell weathering.
The degree of weathering visible is much heavier than I originally intended.
Cab showing the driver.
View from the other end - slightly better!
The underframe was a lot easier to do and was weathered using various shades of sleeper grime, frame dirt, rust, etc, all from the airbrush. When the underframe was complete I installed a Howes DMU sound decoder and a Roads and Rails double Iphone speaker into the body shell. This required a little bit of cutting away of the original speaker housing on the plastic underframe, but was relatively easy to do. The interior had some passengers and a driver added, and the lights and glazing were reassembled.
The speaker in place.
Underframe weathered and passengers ready!
Hopefully some of the variation in the underframe weathering is visible in this shot.
Close up showing the cut away of the plastic interior to house the speaker.
I still need to finish off the bogies, with a blast of matt varnish and reassemble the hole unit. However, the verdict so far?.....I am not really happy with this model. The weathered finish on the body shell is too much. I am considering just buying a new body shell or a whole new DMU!! Whilst that might sound drastic, when you consider the cost of the DMU plus DCC sound plus speaker is somewhere in the region of £250, that is a lot of money to spend on something you are not happy with. The whole thing needs to be reassembled to see how it looks together, and then I need to spend a weekend running it on the layout to see how I feel about it. However, a somewhat frustrating project so far.....at least the Class 22 is shaping up nicely!
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