My work on the horse dawn parcels van and a talk with a friend about Brumm horse drawn carriages prompted me to dig out my example which is destined as a load on one of my scratch built Open Carriage trucks (what else you might wonder).
How I come to have this is a bit of a tale of how nice people can be. I was doing my Silhouette demo at a show and was talking to a gent about the OCT's and he mentioned that he had some 1:43rd scale horse drawn vehicles. I confess that other than liking the idea that I may be able to get a vehicle to travel on the OCT's I didn't think any more about it because I hadn't (and still haven't) finished them. However at the next show I demoed at the gent that I had been chatting to came along and brought one of the vehicle for me. I paid a token sum and we both went away happy.
The observant amongst you will note that it has one of the carriage lamps missing and that the other isn't a great representation.
I thought it might make an interesting little project to turn/mill a couple of replacements
I put a bit of silver paint on to make them more photo genic.
Following on from my making of the replacement carriage lamps for the Brumm Carriage, I decided that I really couldn't live with that bright yellow livery.
So, in between other jobs, I carefully took it to bits and resprayed all the bits to take off the 'plasticy'/toy like look. This journey was helped by my sorting out the issues with two of my airbrushes and completely killing the third when the spray nozzle broke off as I was reassembling it after a thorough clean. I have kept the remaining parts as I am pretty sure that the needle and other bits will fit one of the others.
I originally wanted to finish it in a crimson lake colour but I didn't have any paint to hand so I enlisted Chris's assistance to mix some. Part way through that process she arrived at a lovely plum colour which I rather liked so we stuck with that.
I still need to fit the replacement carriage lamps though.
Back on page 40 I finished the painting of the Hand crane and match trucks. I decided to enter them into this year's Guildex Modelling competition so that prompted me to get my finger out and letter them.
I managed to grab a couple more shots out in the sunshine this morning. I am really pleased that this took third place in the Modelling competition. It was one of three cranes entered and one of them took first. The one that took first was an impressive scratch built beast with a professional paint job which really made it look superb. As soon as I saw it first thing in the morning I was sure that it would win.