A snapshot in time. A glimpse of the Plettenberger Kleinbahn in 1/22.5 scale.

[Hydrostat]

Ah, okay! Thank you, Ray, for the explanation!

Volker

[Lawton Maner]

Thank you for the link to the manufacturer.  As for "vender" the meaning is the seller or distributor.

Have very productive New Year.

[Hydrostat]

As for "vender" the meaning is the seller or distributor.

Thanks. I asked myself which profiles/shapes you asked for  .

[Hydrostat]

A little progress with some small items for that project.

Time ... another year gone by without any namable results. At least some details:

For comparison again some prototype pictures (all from W. D. Groote collection).







The stone bollards werde 3D printed with the same printer the anvil block was made of. This time I hoped the horizontal printer lines may add a bit to a prototypical appearance of dressed stone, but they disappeared nearly completely after the process.



A mixture of old Floquil 'concrete color', some Humbrol White, clear matte varnish (all three understood as binder as well as color), thinner, slate dust and silicon carbide F360 grid serves to create a ground texture.



Caran d'Ache gouache washings, starting with  heavily dilluted black and additional ochre and green tones applied wet in wet result in an appearance anywhere between dressed stone and raw, old concrete.



The iron bar is a piece of a cleaning machine brush, which one sometimes finds out on the pavements. Of course they never have exactly the right diameter, but some research led me to a company producing those brushes, which kindly gave me some meters of the needed material, which is 2.8 x 0.45 mm. At their website there's an interesting collection of old cleaning machines - may be of interest for the vehicle builders among us: http://www.weber-buersten.eu/historische-kehrmaschinen/bilder-kehrmaschinen/. The material was annealed before coloring with gouache for the rust stains.





The cast sign was etched from 0.5 mm brass.



U-shaped bent wires attach it to the tube, which should have worked at the prototype for it's wall thickness.



The other sign is pressed and enameled sheet, which needs some other kind of fixture.  







The U-shaped band clamps are etched from stainless steel; they've been part of the etching sheet for the drawing machine. Unfortunately i made a mistake with their length calculation and so they needed to be soldered to brass U-section 2x1 mm, with a tiny brass block inserted to have them clamping to the tube afterwards.  

The 2mm brass tube's inner diameter was bored up to 1.6 mm to have a more prototypically appearance. I know - the tube for sure was closed at top to avoid rusting away from inside, but I like the appearance.





The brass parts then were burnished with Gravoxide and the tinned areas with a blackening fluid from a tiffany store. I colored the sign with white Humbrol enamel and then carefully removed color from the letters and the edge with some brush cleaner, following by a wash with black and green gouache. The surface first hand doesn't seem to accept this water based color at all, but when it starts to dry (proceeding with brushing) it leaves behind those stains. I've seen some old sheet signs with a somewhat embossed/rounded edge, which I tried to replicate. The second sign was printed to glossy paper (three clear colors withoput any imprinted wheathering or so) and embossed with some sharp edged tubing on a piece of sintra board and then cut out. Most difficult part was to position the punch at the right place and it took at least a forenoon to have some acceptable result.



The back was treated with very thin CA, which led to the speckled appearance at the front. Unfortunately the CA leaves some stains behind, which make the surface uneven and a bit rough. The back needed a coat of white and then black enamel to make it opaque; maybe some brush traces reinforced the CA stains at that point. A final coloring with a black edding led to the somewhat blueish appearance of enameled signs. Again gouache for additional rust and dirt stains.





Washes at the sign post were done with gouache again.



I should have stopped here, but I wanted to have the back a bit more even and less shiny, using some pigments. Looking good at hand i was a bit shocked seeing the pictures. For the upper one there's some improvement for sure, but the lower one now rather looks like directly from a scrap yard. I still think it may be alright considering the signs' position under a tree, beside a brook.









Any suggestions how to get a more even surface? Sanding by hand doesn't work to well because of the paper's sensitivity. I know, making it from metal would be the way, but this means to start with decals or so and I wanted to give paper another try. What do you think about it?

Same with the third sign on a wooden pole. Crackles were made by staining a wooden and carved rod with thinned black gouache, which then was colored with white enamel in two or three different thick layers and a coat of white acrylics, which then were stripped of with tesa film. First careful  stripping didn't lead to any noticeable result, so I tried very bristly which in some areas took away all the color - including the very first black washing, which i then redid as very last step. The solution seems to lie in between  .










Cheers,
Volker

[Bill Gill]

Volker, You posted a lot of "little progress"! and it all looks so very well done. The bollards look a bit more like old raw concrete to me than stone, but they look excellent regardless.

It is interesting to see the metal street cleaning brush "bristles". I have a small collection of them found along streets and parking lots because I liked the look of them but had not found a use for them except maybe for steel beams on a flat car load. Most of mine are already rusted.Thanks for the idea. I also have some smaller(thinner and narrower) steel strips that are used as supports and retainers to hold windshield wiper blades in place. You may find those useful for other situations.

The attention to details on the signs is wonderful! I enlarged the first paper sign but could not detect the unevenness that you asked about. How did you get the printer ink to adhere to the glossy paper surface without beading up?

Perhaps one alternative to paper might be the self adhesive white vinyl sheet material that Ray Dunakin uses for signs and packages. I think its surface would be very smooth and it can be printed with an inkjet printer and then perhaps stuck to a thin metal backing to keep the thickness as thin as possible. Another possible option might be a photograph printed on a plastic "paper" substrate. I have experimented with making signs like that. They were printed at a local retail drugstore Kodak kiosk using a thermal transfer process. The surface is very smooth and it may take a little experimenting to get weathering materials to adhere to it. The "paper" may also be a little thick, but the top plastic layer can be carefully sliced from the backing paper with a razor blade. Doing that however will expose a rougher texture on the back.

[Hydrostat]

Bill, thanks a lot for your thoughts!

It is interesting to see the metal street cleaning brush "bristles". I have a small collection of them found along streets and parking lots because I liked the look of them but had not found a use for them except maybe for steel beams on a flat car load. Most of mine are already rusted.Thanks for the idea. I also have some smaller(thinner and narrower) steel strips that are used as supports and retainers to hold windshield wiper blades in place. You may find those useful for other situations.

I love finding parts outside and having them in stock for - anything. Indeed the part was rusted before, but the rust's appearance is to coarse even in the larger scales. I then found that the edges sometimes are to much rounded from constant use and wear. So I ended up sanding the narrow sides down to achieve some rectangular edges. Annealing and afterwards wiping over them with a paper towel takes away the out of scale rust and makes the surface somewhat water acceptant which is necessary for the gouache. I tried to burnish/rust them like the grooved rails, but it doesn't work to well, for sure because it's spring steel typical chemical composition.
 

The attention to details on the signs is wonderful! I enlarged the first paper sign but could not detect the unevenness that you asked about. How did you get the printer ink to adhere to the glossy paper surface without beading up?

It's the sign's backside, which bothers me. It has those 'brush traces'. The printouts were made with a Canon MX725 printer at highest resolution on that photo (high) glossy paper (I hope it's the right term in english). The drawings on the drawing machines in the Quiet earth thread were made the same way, but printed on cigarette paper. I don't know how long them signs are going to last, keeping a natural color, but that was the available way to come to a result without involving other people/techniques I don't have at hand.

Perhaps one alternative to paper might be the self adhesive white vinyl sheet material that Ray Dunakin uses for signs and packages. I think its surface would be very smooth and it can be printed with an inkjet printer and then perhaps stuck to a thin metal backing to keep the thickness as thin as possible. Another possible option might be a photograph printed on a plastic "paper" substrate. I have experimented with making signs like that. They were printed at a local retail drugstore Kodak kiosk using a thermal transfer process. The surface is very smooth and it may take a little experimenting to get weathering materials to adhere to it. The "paper" may also be a little thick, but the top plastic layer can be carefully sliced from the backing paper with a razor blade. Doing that however will expose a rougher texture on the back.

The first hint sounds very reasonable. I'm a bit concerned about the durability of the bonding to the metal, but it may be worth a try. It isn't that I don't like the result at all - it looks a bit like a badly, maybe even with some tar based material painted sign to prevent further rusting - but it isn't the surface/effect I'd try to achieve.

Cheers,
Volker

[finescalerr]

Wow. -- Russ

[nk]

Volker these signs are amazing.

The other week I was on some scaffolding looking at the carved 12 century Portal of Glory in the Catherdral of Santiago de Compostela and the stone masons detailed the tops of heads, and other hidden areas that would never have been seen. You are doing the same thing here with the details on the backs of enameled signs and elsewhere. Extraordinary and beautiful.

I really like the bollards and the use of silicon carbide in paint to give texture.

Its all very inspiring to see.

[Ray Dunakin]

Beautiful work, looks very authentic to me!

[Hydrostat]

Russ, Narayan and Ray, thank you.

The other week I was on some scaffolding looking at the carved 12 century Portal of Glory in the Catherdral of Santiago de Compostela and the stone masons detailed the tops of heads, and other hidden areas that would never have been seen. You are doing the same thing here with the details on the backs of enameled signs and elsewhere. Extraordinary and beautiful.

Narayan,
indeed I spent a lot of time researching those street sign fixtures - far more than actually modeling. Today's standardized fixtures have been patented by the Turck company in the late 60s. Unfortunately one doesn't find too many pictures of old signs' rear sides (the number is close to zero) and my assumption was that there were rather individual solutions. I started requests about 20s-40s sign fixtures at Berlin 'Museum für Verkehr und Technik' and Munich 'Deutsches Museum', but they were anable to answer it, although both of them have a collection of signs - but all without their former fixtures. Via a rather small museum, the 'Deutsches Straßenmuseum' in Germersheim, I got an interesting answer of a sign collector who indeed collected some poles, too, and it confirmed my assumption. The most interesting one was a sign 'Bahnhof', which was welded to a steam engine's former superheater element ... I'm a bit defiant to the choices made concerning preserving things or not  .

Cheers,
Volker

[lab-dad]

Stunning!
Your work always inspires!
-Mj

[Barney]

I agree always inspires !!
Barney

[Hydrostat]

Thanks Marty and Barney, glad to read that.

There's been a street lamp at the Maiplatz, which catched my attention for the last two months:



It was situated centered on the round pedestal in the foreground left hand from the tracks.



The pole is made from brass tubing with different diameters. Each wider part got a slope to the narrower one sanded in the drill chuck.



A printout served as a jig to solder the prepared copper parts, which were cut to length, bent or filed according to their position and shape needed at the connecting points. Copper bends much easier than brass.



Lamp corpus was brass casted at shapeways. The lampshade is rounded with the Dremel, annealed and bent with a big marmel on a eraser. A aluminum jig helped to mount both parts centered. I spent some 5 or 6 hours to drill the 0.3 mm holes into the cable entry and a center hole of 0.8 mm diameter, which both aren't castable.







Just to recognize in the end that the inserted 0.15 mm enameled copper wire lost it's insulation after pulling it through. So I changed to FXD printed parts. Including the holes.

- To be continued -



Cheers,
Volker

[Allan G]

Just INCREDIBLE!!!!! Allan

[Bill Gill]

Wow that looks good!