A large dose of courage, or possibly just my pig-headedness or outright insanity has resulted in an attempt to apply virtually full lining to the splashers, sandboxes, running plate angle irons, steps and tender frames of the Stirling 174 series loco, alongside my attempts to get on with livery of the V4 too.
I had done as much as seemed possible or sensible using HMRS lining that I had to hand, so had to switch to bow pen and fine brushes. Compared to time spent actually applying the lines, I may well have spent longer removing paint with a spirit-dampened brush, and re-touching background colour alongside lining. I know it has all taken a very long time, and I am very conscious that I need to get on with some resin casting soon for a couple of patient fellow modellers.
The red lining to the lower parts of the models is freshly applied today. That on the Stirling model will certainly need some further tidying in places and subsequent addition of the black edges that the red line is supposed to separate from the brown. Unfortunately, the red lines are a darker shade than the more convincingly "vermillion" shade on the buffer beams as I simply could not tolerate the extremely slow drying time of the lighter/brighter red paint, so I switched to trusty Humbrol 19 for the lining. I hope it will not be strikingly different once the black is there too.
Because the hornplates around the axleboxes on my Kitmaster-based tender are wrongly represented on the outside of the frames, when there should simply be flat plate in those areas, and because I didn't alter that feature, I felt that there was no way to correctly or tidily apply the red lines that should run around the frame cut-outs close to the edges of each axlebox. I have however tried to line the faces of the axleboxes themsleves correctly and I hope it will end up looking as if there is enough lining overall. If it all fails to convince, I do have the option or returning to a plain brown finish on the frames. Groves, in his book on the Stirling locos, suggests that the black edging and red lining was sometimes omitted.
The lining of the V4 has proved awkward in places because of original builder's defects that I hadn't spotted at an earlier stage when I removed most of the mal-positioned cast boiler band from the firebox. I should also have noticed that solder had partly filled the angle between the firebox, the cab front and the raised lower rim of one of the spectacles. I was so far into the job when I recognised the problem that I rejected the idea of trying to undo that fault. Lining has therefore had to run over the unwanted irregularity! With the running plate not being quite level under one side of the cab and firebox too I've had to be careful to try to make it look level by applying the red lining horizontally (like the white on the lower edge of the cab) as I think that the eye tends to notice the white and red more than the black areas...