Porter Tender: Paintwork

Rungen abkleben
Masking stakes

With working couplers between loco and tender finished, I finally wanted to see some colour on the side walls. First, the stakes were painted with carmine red acrylic paint, as were the handrails. That turned out to be a bit tricky, but a second coating provided an acceptable surface.

After all handrails looked nice and the paint was dried, the red areas were masked with tape. You have to work carefully and pay attention to apply enough pressure at the edges of the tape, in order to avoid fresh paint to seep into the gaps of the wood’s grain.

Porter Tender: Stake Pockets

Stake pocket prototype.
Stake pocket prototype.

By finishing the tender’s frame (german version, translation pending) it’s about time to focus on the side walls. Quite an important part is to build the stake pockets, with the prototype they form the link between the side walls and the frame, with the models most of the time it’s just cosmetics. Since I’d like to build as many parts as possibly by myself and some prototypical pictures revealed that sometimes simple solutions prevail in  the 1 : 1 scale, I chose the most primitive approach.