My modelling time for the last week's been devoted to the first of a batch of DZ wagons.
The first of a new design always takes a lot longer to make, with many prototype pitfalls to be discovered and overcome.
The doors, and their sunken panels, have proved to be very tricky. At 7mm from top to bottom they're a couple of mm's smaller than the test piece I knocked up, and it's a lot more difficult to get the tip of the scalpel into there to shave down the raised styrene strip - more so at the ends where it has ended up as more of a round indentation than a square.
However, the real wagons have a very distinctive battered look and I hope it won't notice too much at viewing distance at an exhibition.
To show you how much work is involved in each of the six doors on the wagon here's a shot of some of the components.
There is an outer rectangle with curved corners. This is fabricated from 4 strips, then tiny triangles are glued into the corners and filed down to form the curve.
That's then glued onto the front of a plain piece of styrene. Then I make up the inner panel with more strips - the ones at each end have the corners chopped and rounded off before they're glued down. More strip completes the top and bottom of the rectangle. Then they're finished off by scribing with the scalpel as described above.
And to think I've got to make 24 of these....
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