The windscreen wipers were made from two pieces of wire with the blade soldered to the double arms (fiddly assembly).
The off white coach line filled me with dread. It would be quite tricky to paint a clean straight line even with masking tape where the paint might leech under. I opted for a strip of sticky paper. This worked well but with age could unpeel itself. It will be simple to repair in this event.
The BR totem is a transfer taken from a HMRS transfer sheet for 4 mm scale models. It looks about the right size compared to prototype photographs, even though this is a 7mm scale model.
The side windows in the centre part of the body with their grommet surrounds were made as before and still suffered from glue overspill. I am putting the resulting frosted look in places down to dirty windows!
Deciding on a loco number was left to the last minute. I wanted a number
that is recorded as having worked the South Western area of BR(S). The number also had to reflect the original exhaust arrangement and pierced step
sides and be from an early manufactured batch. D6504 fitted my
requirement.
Numerals on the transfer sheet are coloured yellow. They need to be white so, I created a green background for a white legend and printed it onto sticky backed paper. The green match is perfect and the number looks like a transfer rather than the printed label that it is.
It sounds as though I paid great attention to detail but there are two notable exceptions because I could not see an easy way of producing the parts or they are fairly insignificant. These are a row of triangular supports between the overhanging body sides and sole bar and protruding 'eyebrows' above the front windows where the wipers attach.
This has been a very enjoyable project with many challenges overcome and just a few curses along the way. Looking back it has taken about 3 months of intensive work and instilled in me a greater appreciation of the efforts and skill of designers and manufacturers who create and deliver to the market place highly detailed models . The high ticket price of 0 gauge scale models is justified in my view.
My attention now turns to building a layout to run my growing 7 mm stock on.
To Part 1 of this series.
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