Mountain wrote:I have a spare packet or two of Bachmann small tension lock couplings... At least one packet.
Much appreciated, however I seem to be jumping into this with both feet, with currently 34 wagons, and a planned further 38. So I'm looking at somewhat more industrial quantities.
PinkNosedPenguin wrote:If Peter Spares ones come back in stock (see link in my previous post) then they are only £4.40 for a pack of 10
INCLUDING (a kind of) NEM pockets
- or maybe they are available elsewhere . . . ?
Absolutely, and if that shows itself as the easier option, that's what I'll do.
Alternatively though, I've found that most of this range of wagons has a standardised height and pair of holes in the frame. I've found that I can draw up a small piece in TinkerCad that fits on to these and serves as an NEM pocket. Like this, in fact:
- nemsocket.png (230.98 KiB) Viewed 2446 times
And I can get nearly 200 of these (I'm only planning 72 wagons, so only need 144, but may as well have spares) printed commercially for less than £20 total, so I may follow this route. First, though, is to get the height and adjust the piece's CAD to fit.
But in the meantime, another parcel arrived from eBay, with 18 more wagons, and a few bare frames I'll be turning into tankers. So they went straight into the production line, frames painted black and bodies primed.
I'm awaiting a delivery of paints, including a darker grey for those wagons remaining in grey (almost all of this new batch, and the majority overall).
On the subject of paints, though, where am I getting them? Well, I'm not too handy with brushes, particularly on overall colours. And I don't have an airbrush at this time, also finding them rather fiddly until I'm proficient enough, so I'm sticking to spray paints. But they're quite high pressure, the ones they sell at Wilko, often pinging the model halfway across the garage. And they don't have a wide enough range of colours. So I set about searching t'Interwebs, and found
Graff-City, who aim for the graffiti "artist"'s market. Particularly their
Clash or
Dope Surpeme ranges. Cheap, postage is as low as a flat £4.50, so one can get five cans for about £20 total, making them cheaper than WIlko's cheapest.
But the main advantage is the plungers. As mentioned before, most spray paints have two modes. Off, or high pressure on. These graffitiers' cans, however, have two-stage plungers, so you can get a nice easy low-pressure spray, not quite as precise as an airbrush but good enough for base coat purposes.