Well it's been two weeks since my knee surgery and things are progressing well.
As mentioned in my last post, while I had the mill out I decided to get a few more Atlas GP chassis prepped for the rest of my GP18 fleet, 5 total. The two Red and Yellow 18's are ready to have chips installed and programmed and I still need to get MTL couplers installed. Then they'll at least be serviceable for the next session.
The next GP18 I worked on is one that always caught my eye.
Not sure of the whole story behind this one? It wasn't a wreck rebuild. I read somewhere that the shops must have had some extra yellow paint laying around and needed to use it up? Either way is it a sharp looking unit that I've been wanting to add to my fleet mainly because it adds to the Character of the Rock Island in my eyes.
I didn't need to do too much customization to this unit other than add the flared arrestors, a firecracker antenna, cab shades, new cab numbers, number boards and then I needed to fabricate the air filter on the top.
This was done with a few scraps of styrene.
Not perfect, but it gets the idea across.
Then I added some small scraps of extruded screen to the flared arrestors.
Before I painted the yellow or started on the weathering, because I was not able to remove the glazing, I used some liquid mask to cover the windows and headlights on both ends. The last bottle I bought was dried up so I tried some Humbrol Maskol this time. This stuff worked very well!
As I did on the ICG units, I used primarily Pan Pastels for the weathering medium. I also used some P3 Armor Wash to darken the grilles and to make the dark stain under the rear intake grille. I was able to get crisper lines with the P3.
As I was afraid of, the Pan Pastels did dissipate a little after I sprayed the first coat of Dull Coat on the unit to seal it. I went back over the model with a bit heavier coat of Pastels then reshot the Dull Coat. This seemed to help but I wondered if I had not gotten a thick enough or rough enough coat of the Dull Coat to help hold the Pastels in the first place? Another thing I did was to mist several light coats on and let them dry before spraying a heavier sealer coat to protect the weathering. It seemed to work?
In this shot I grabbed an Intermountain F7A that was originally built by flight2000 (Brian K). He built this F7 for a customer in Germany who later sold it on eBay and I was lucky enough to score it.
Three GP18's down, 2 to go...