Another pot pourri day… Worked on the engine house parking lot, cleaned up more 3D prints, finished the little drill press, put two coats on the appliance store steps and created the appliance logos and made a decal sheet.
First the decals. The Internet was kind enough to present me with a lot of decent resolution appliance logos and I captured the major ones that would have been in a store in the 1960s and 70s which is generally my era.
I couldn't use CorelDraw for this. When I upgraded to Mac OS Catalina, my VM Fusion emulator no longer starts Windows and therefore, no Coreldraw. I have VM Fusion Ver 8.5 and it's not compatible with the latest MAC OS. I have to pay $50 and buy VM Fusion ver. 11.5 if I ever want to use Corel Draw again. I do… therefore I'm probably going to have to spring for it.
Instead, I edited the individual logos in the Mac Preview program and then imported them one by one into a 5" X 7" page in MAC Pages (their word processor). This enabled me to create something that could be printed at high resolution on the clear background decal paper. I coated the entire sheet with Testor's Decal Film. I have to create the inside walls before I apply them.
I cleaned up the Vertical Turret Lathe and also made a brass hand wheel for the tiny drill press. Sometimes the best thing to simulate metal is…. metal. I'm very happy with the VTL. The only piece I had to fix was the vertical lead screw that was just to fragile up top to handle the de-supporting action. I drilled through the top piece and inserted a piece of 0.020" brass wire.
They're a little oversized, but there's no mistaking that this is a DRILL PRESS. The hub and knobs are Bondic.
I painted their first coat some blue that I already had in a bottle. I think it's the blue from the Corsair project. I though it was Tamiya and used alcohol as a thinner, but as it was drying I realized that it was Vallejo. That acrylic does not thin well with alcohol and can clump, but it worked okay. Vallejo dries more slowly than Tamiya. Tomorrow I will do the detail painting on these two tools.
I printed out some more work tables. On one I broke off a leg and replaced it with a piece of styrene. I thought the table tops were sufficiently thick for successful printing. The top was, but the middle shelf was very thin and when removing the supports, each one developed a hole. I put a piece of styrene on the bottom and filled and filed Bondic to make a smooth surface that NO ONE WILL EVER SEE.
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I have a bench grinder to print that could go on one of these tables. I'm going to print some more. Can't ever have enough work surfaces.
Here's the machine shop with just about all the machines it's going to get. You can't see the metal rack that's out of frame on the front right side. I think I need about three more tables.
I masked the engine house parking lot. The grout and acrylic base line paint didn't hold tape worth a darn. Part of the problem was the coarse texture of the grout. Tamiya tape didn't hold at all. Tamiya flexible tape didn't hold either. I ended up with 3M Blue tape and it was still a struggle. I burnished it down as best as I could do. I then slathered a mix of black, white and gray over the entire paved area trying not to lift the masking tape in the process.
After black painting the lines were decent, but needed some tender loving care. I added additional staining in the parking spots. You can see the leakage on some of the lines.
Using a small brush I went back and trimmed up all the lines. I will do some pastel weathering once all the acrylic is totally cured. I need to knock down a little bit of the white line brightness.
And now the parking lot is getting some P & P RR employees parking. I have to get some more "normal" vehicles for the employees. A 1975 Pace, a Beetle Cabriolet, and a Studebaker aren't particularly representative. I still have to make the parking stops and do more vegetation along the building wall. At our Military Modelers Club of Louisville meeting tonight one of the members demonstrated using a static grass applicator. This would be a good place for it, but I'm not happy buying an $80.00+ tool for some limited landscaping applications. The ragged edge at the parking lot/layout interface is going to be cleaned up when I purchase and install the final fascia boards on the inside portion of the layout. That Pacer like the one I owned. Worst car ever produced in the USA!
