Wordless Wednesday #264

A Few Words About Wordless Wednesday #263

You may have noticed a lull in activity hereabouts. Yup, it's that time of year again at work. It's super busy, but at least it's predictable. Part of it's charm. #sarcasm

But stay tuned - there are some additions to share. If you're a member of the Valley Local Facebook Group (which you should definitely join if you can), you've already gotten a little preview...

ANYhoo..... Turns out I got a helping hand on today's content, in the form of a guest post from . . . well, read on . . .

* * * * *

I was somewhat surprised by Chris’s Wordless Wednesday photo. I sent
him a comment asking if I was disqualified from the “contest” of
naming the location in the image.

The reason? It was a photo I had taken, back in 1978 if I recall
correctly. I was at first unable to think how Chris had ended up with
the image, but then remembered that I’d had him scan the slide for a
presentation I did a year or two ago about the yard in Willimantic (a
video of that presentation is on line here). Chris responded that all
scanned images go into a folder on the Photo Library PC and are
randomly selected for his screen saver. He had probably seen the image
pop up and, having forgotten it’s origin, had taken a screen capture and
posted it to find out if anyone knew the area depicted.

Long winded way to get to the point: the image shows the Willimantic,
Connecticut yard from the foot bridge looking East. The two story
building to the left is the former New Haven RR Bridge and Building
department engineering office, now demolished. To the right side of
the image is a Central Vermont section house built to the hip roof
Grand Trunk design, also now long gone. The track closest to the B&B
office is the former New Haven line to Boston via Putnam, CT - at the time
of the photo owned but no longer used by Providence and Worcester. The
right hand bridge and tracks are still Central Vermont when the picture was
taken on a gloomy November afternoon. Today the tracks in town are all
owned by Genesee and Wyoming subsidiaries P&W and New England Central.

Pieter Roos

Chimney Repair

After my Friday Fail, I received a lot of great feedback on how to salvage things. Some of the best suggestions - including using this "fail" as an opportunity to develop a new method of weathering (call it "zip taping" or somesuch...) - I finally decided that most of those ideas would tend to bog me down. I really appreciate folks weighing in, but in the end I just decided to reshoot it and keep moving forward.

This time, I masked the top of the concrete/stone base with Tamiya tape, then regular masking tape, then newspaper, as you see in the above pic.

Chimney all ready for respraying

Resprayed. Total time to this point, maybe 10-15 minutes, tops.

Unfortunately, as you can see, even the Tamiya tape peeled up some of the underlying paint. Based on the feedback I got, this is due to one - or all - of the following:

• Failure to clean the parts to remove any mold release
• Failure to do a primer coat
• Failure to wait long enough for the paint to well and truly cure

No worries though. Even stupidity such as this can be corrected...

I decanted a little bit of the spray paint into a bottle cap . . .

and then used a business card (no adhesive!) as a mask to allow me to touch up the paint with a small brush.

Should have taken this pic closer (click to enlarge), but hopefully you can tell that it's all nice and uniform now. No chips!

And here's the painted - though not yet finished - chimney. I still need to paint the cap the same color as the base, not to mention spraying some black inside (which I probably should have done first).

After adding mortar lines to the brick (likely subject of my next post, since I'm in the process of experimenting with different techniques), I may opt to Dullcote it to seal it well before doing any weathering.

Be sure to let me know if any upcoming pitfalls occur to you!

Wordless Wednesday #263 - Name That Location

Friday Fail: Masking Tape :^(

So, fresh off my self-admonition to Just Do It earlier this week, and full of motivation, I dove right in to masking and painting the chimney I'll be using alongside Stanley Chemical.

I'll try not to let the resulting failure discourage me from continuing to press on. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

You may have noticed in the painting photos from the last post that I had already painted the brick portion of the chimney with my rattle can of flat red primer. But there's also a stone block portion at the bottom, so I needed to mask off the brick and shoot that with some "stone block" color (full disclosure - it's the same flat khaki rattle can paint I used for the concrete. I figure I'll vary the color a little with weathering).

I used some blue painter's tape (supposedly a lot less sticky than regular masking tape) to create a sharp line at the top of the stone/concrete portion and then used a combination of regular masking tape and newspaper to mask off the rest of the stack.

Then I shot it with my rattle can of khaki. 10 minutes total, tops.

But later, it got interesting. You can see what happened. The supposedly "less sticky" blue painter's tape still removed some of the red paint.

Now, a couple of potential lessons occur to me right off the bat:

• In my haste to "just do it," not only did I not bother with an airbrush (no problem there), but I didn't do my usual primer coat either (perhaps big problem there - especially since the chimney is a resin casting).
• Again, in my haste, I may have neglected to let the paint dry fully before masking it. In my defense, I did wait 24 hours, but it may have needed longer.
• Finally, I used blue painter's tape - great for household painting, but maybe not so great for masking models. Next time, I'll use Tamiya masking tape, made for modeling. Bonus: it's also narrower.

The reality is that what happened is probably a combination of a little bit of all the above.

But at least I did get a really nice, sharp dividing line between the brick and the concrete/stone. Now I just need to decide whether I want to try masking the concrete/stone and shoot the brick again with the rattle can, or decant the paint from the rattle can into a cup and brush paint the now-faded brick area.

What would you do? What would you have done differently?

"Happy" Friday!

Wordless Wednesday #262

Photo Library Night

Tuesday Tip: Just DO it!

Fifty minutes. That's 5-0. As in, five-zero, as in 10 minutes less than an hour.

That's all the time it took me to paint Stanley Chemical, the stand-in for the East Berlin station, and a chimney - something I've been putting off for, what?, almost two months?!

I know I've had a few other things going on, but That Is Just Crazy.

So, what finally got me motivated to pull the trigger (or press the nozzle)? Today's Tuesday Tip. . .

"Just Do It" is probably a bit overdone (not to mention trademarked), but it's often the best advice for self-motivation in a variety of areas, from exercise to painting 1/87th scale buildings (apparently). But it's so overused it's become a bit hollow. It did however make me think about things in a way that's a bit more helpful, at least when it comes to painting models:

The painting is just the first step in finishing. Yup - pretty self-evident when you give it half a thought - but I can't tell you how often I see a great looking, finished building and think "Man! That guy just painted it and it looks GREAT!" Forgetting, of course, that all that variety of color, not to mention weathering, etc., didn't just come out of the spray can or airbrush like that. Painting is just the first step in a process that includes going over it again (and again and again, if necessary) in order to get the effect you're after.

You ain't gonna accomplish that with a shot of paint - no matter how long you wait and obsess over it. Best just to pick some good base colors (anything will be better than the molded plastic colors) and shoot'em. LATER you'll go back and add variety of shade, weathering, and all the other little things that will make the building "finished."

And the sooner you start, the sooner you'll get it to that state.

8pm - I picked out 4 colors of spray paint I had on-hand (didn't want to risk getting bogged down with the airbrush - I think rattle cans are usually fine enough for structures. We'll see.). Flat Red Primer for all the brick, Camouflage Khaki for all the concrete, flat black for the roofs (probably should have used a grimy black - but hey, I'll just lighten as needed with weathering/chalks. #NoObsessing #SeewhatImean?), dark green for the windows/doors/trim. Later I also grabbed a light gray for the roof vents.

Next, I gathered together parts that would be painted the same color and put them on scraps of cardboard so I could easily move them out of the booth for drying and to get them out of the way.

I stuck smaller pieces to masking tape to keep them upright and keep them from blowing away.

8:50 pm - After spraying all the different colors & moving the groups of parts aside for drying (all the while listening to my favorite podcast), I was done! Just couldn't resist an overall photo showing all the parts together.

Of course, as one of my favorite Winston Churchill sayings goes: "This is not The End, this is not even The Beginning of the End, but it IS The End of the Beginning" I'd always thought of painting these parts and this Big Deal when, in fact, it is only a first step in a whole process of finishing. Seeing it in that light - as one small, dare I say "easy"? step in the kit building process - makes it a lot less intimidating. If I can just remember that, maybe next time I won't put it off so much and I'll

Just Do It!