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 Posted - January 17 2014 : 6:01:47 PM
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Well, I was busy over the holidays and managed to get some painting and decaling done on my "dual" project of the Athearn Crane and an accompanying boom car. I had a difficult time with the GN empire green paint color, but was "schooled" by a modeler on the MR forum, who graciously provided examples of how sun fading versus fresh paint can creat different colors of the same thing. I was advised to try Pullman green (Pollyscale Acrylic), but when I tested it, it also appeared not quite right. Finally, a can of Rustoleum dark green was the best choice and on it went- onto the two chassis:
The crane chassis is already dullcoted and ready for the wired truck to be attached (will re-post later with an image of that stuff), while I still need to give the flat car deck of the boom car some weathered character before dullcoting that one.
The blob on the boom car is additional weight, which will be hidden in the caboose cabin.
I had a sheet of Great Northern Diesel lettering in the GN "empire" font and was able to use those to letter the two cars. Interestingly, the only GN empire font was available as a purchase item online, but that was dated 1994 (Railfonts Online- Ben Coifman). Since then, another font website turned up the exact same font, but for free. I still needed to widen the horizontal width of the letters to give the proper appearance of that used by GN, using my Autocad abilities. I believe that you can manipulate font height and width with Adobe Photoshop or Imagemaker, but I am not familiar with those tools.
I had first primered the different pieces and these images of the crane cab show the modifications (louvers, grabs and the front and rear LED surround frames):
I wanted constant lighting, so I made my first foray into soldering circuits (apart from LEDs and resistors by purchasing a capacitor and bridge rectifier diode at Radio Shack and soldering them as per the diagram I published in my earlier post on this project, albeit with some assistance from some electronics experts on the MRH online forum. The wiring job is a bit "casual", bit I hope to improve this soon with more projects.
I am using 2-wire M-F connectors, so I can remove the crane's cab from the chassis, if needed for any reason. That is a first for me- I bout 25 pairs of these connectors from EBay from a Chinese source for less than $5.00 (free shipping, but no fortune cookies!)
Also, I am using wire taken from computer ribbon cable, which is 28 AWG- much easier to work with in the small world of HO scale. As the wires will carry negligible current loads and the LEDs are not prone to heating up, I think it will do fine:
The paint job on the crane cab will involve more planning (read: masking) and I need to get
additonal GN goat heerald decals, as well.
That's all for now- more to come soon!
Siouxlake Ron
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Posted - January 17 2014 : 6:13:49 PM
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| Nice work siouxlake; on all of it . . . paint, lettering, engineering, electrics.
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Country: USA ~
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Member Since: March 16 2013 ~
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Posted - January 20 2014 : 5:19:12 PM
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Neat project, Ron. Nice job on the little breadboard.
The Tyco Depot
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