Best Of New Brass EP-2 assembly & Mod clinic

[u18b]

Things still to do:

Paint boiler room window glass gray.
Find some new Numbers for the numberboards and install them.
Paint red on door handrails.
install door rails.
Create nose and side grabs (4 per cab).
Paint silver.
Final touch up of various colors.
Good final clearcoat.
Install window glass in Cabs.
Install headlight lenses.
Install weights.
Create the multi-part box herald on the boiler room.

Paint those shiny wheels to keep the Railwire guys happy ( ).

Final assembly.
Re-Balance decoders.

(A few other surprises cooking in my gray matter).

A long way to go, but I can see the end now.

[u18b]

Just about finished the boiler room.

Looks good, but the decals were not perfectly scaled to the model.
I had to squeeze them together to get it all to fit.

Right side.



Left side.

[peteski]

Ouch!  After all that fastidious work you did (bordering on obsessive perfection  ) you end up with a decal which is not a perfect fit.  That stinks!

[u18b]

Pete,
I was pretty much thinking the same thing.

But I think it looks OK.

Remember, the bottom pinstripe is set by the handrail along the hood.

Since:
A. That line allows little room on the boiler room.



B. And there is almost not enough room at all for the nose herald under the door window....



I'm sort of concluding that the handrail is a little high (maybe only a mm).




Not that any of this is a real complaint.

I think it is all coming together for a beautiful model.

[u18b]

I indicated earlier that the resolution of the Alps printer was about max-ed out on the very fine lines in the nose herald.
You can see all the strokes that dropped off in this shot.


I originally said, it didn't matter to me.
LOL.  I changed my mind.

I didn't have another good THE, but the EE on the MILWAUKEE side was good on another decal (remember I'm ending up using two decal sheets for this loco).

So I doubled   EE  ROAD



Looks better--- even if I can't see a thing from 2 feet away (much less 3).
At least the photography will look a little better.

[u18b]

The numberboard decals were too big for this brass model.  A disappointment.   



So I had to search for other solutions.
Went through about 100 decals looking for white numbers and letters.

I found three possibilities and went with one that was a bit unusual.

I had a CSX Bright Future decal set for O scale- 
Yep, you heard that right.
I bought these when Chessiefan was a kid back around 1992.
I painted a bedroom dresser in CSX Bright Future colors.
Top was blue.  Front was yellow, and the sides had the slant.
And then I applied one of these O scale decals on the front.

So low and behold, in O scale, they provide the gear ratio lettering on the trucks!
Hey!  There is an E, and there is a 3  and a dash.



The REALLY hard part about this was the dash had to go IN FRONT of the three.
So I had to carefully cut the dash out and apply it separately.
(Too bad the one I was modeling wasn't E-2.   THAT would have been easy.).

The prototype had slightly unusual placement.   Whichever side you look at (left or right) the numbers and letters are AWAY from the headlight skewed toward the opposite edge.

So that's what I did (or tried).













I don't mind telling you that the DASH was very tedious to work with.
An entire evening on just this.
Glad it is done.

[peteski]

Ron,
too bad that I don't have access to the decal artwork - I could resize that artwork and reprint it for you in the correct size (and print several copies of the nose lettering to see if few would be more usable).  The halftone lines in the lettering also bug me.  But it is what it is (as much as I hate to use that saying). 

[spookshow]

It's a pity about the decals. If you're looking for an alternate source, might I suggest Ted Freeman (teditor@bigpond.com)? Dude has an Alps printer, is totally easy to work with, and is not prone to screwing up and/or vanishing into nowhere.

Cheers,
-Mark

[Chris333]

It is like every little step of this project is a whole magazine article!

[u18b]

Thanks Chris.
And everyone else.  I appreciate your comments.

As to the decals, I think the super-close macro shots make it look worse than it is.

It really is attractive when at normal viewing distance of 1-3 feet.

And the camera does not pick up the subtlety that your eye sees- and that is the gold metal film background to the letters on the boiler room.  Just like the prototype.  It looks pretty cool.

[Bob Horn]

Absolutely fantastic!! I would be afraid to run it on my layout if you brought it east. Great job, Bob.

[u18b]

Bob,

I've enjoyed running trains on your layout.

Who knows.   The Olympian Hiawatha May make an excursion to Jax one day.

[u18b]

Still a lot of work to do.

[u18b]

A Railwire member contacted me privately and very kindly asked my to consider....

Not accepting this....



Not a criticism of my modeling or skills, but rather a suggestion that I not be so forgiving.
Given how very perfectionist I have been, and given the high quality of this model overall.... those decals just don't look right.

So I've been doing a lot of thinking.  And here are a couple of my observations.

First, I assembled the model.



Then I tried to take a directly side-on shot.



I then edited the photo with various programs and added a reference line (in blue).



Now, when I look at that photo above, note that the blue reference line is even with the handrails on the hoods.
When measured in this way, you can see that my red separation is just a tiny bit too high-- but not terrible so.
In fact, It is pretty close overall.

So if I re-did the boiler room, I could gain a tiny amount - but not much.

Then I tried something else.

I laid the boiler room next to a side-on photo.
I then took a photo.



From that, with various art and photo editing programs, I can up with a sized short of my model compared to the original.




The length of the images is about the same, but the brass model is just a tad too short (thus that is where some of my problem is).

Furthermore, while the stretched and compressed MILWAUKEE actually looks decent (even it it is only a TINY amount too large)...
The REAL problem is the road number.

Clearly, in this side-by-side, you can see that the E3 decal is not compressed like the MILWAUKEE herald is.

So along with the brass model being just slightly too short, the E3 road number is too big.

Thus my loss of orange space.

[Chris333]

I don't know, looks pretty good so far. The lines sort of change when you look at it from higher up.