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| The Margnat tankcar on the former railway |
In 2010 I started with the conversion of a LGB/ToyTrain tankcar
(LGB 9040) into a French (looking) narrow gauge "wagon citerne".
In this post I will describe how I painted the car and made decals for the Margnat signs. In a second post I will describe how I made the brakeman's cabin and the platform.
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The donor car was the LGB #94040 "Lehmann Benzin".
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Notice that the
rivets on top of the tank are interrupted. I made some replacements
using drips of water resistant white glue.
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| Missing rivets |
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| New rivets |
The molding seam were sanded away on top of the tank and on one of the topsides. The other topside can
be removed like a lid and was molded in another way so it did not have a
visible seam.
Painting
The color scheme is inspired by the H0 "Margnat" tank cars from Jouef, with blue as the main color and a logo in white with red lettering. I made a simple drawing in Paint to see how the tankcar would look like with our without brakeman's cabin and with small or bigger logo. This gave a impression on how the car will become. The lower left option was eventually the winner.
First I sprayed the whole tank gloss white (rattle can from DIY store) as gloss paint is easier to apply decals on than satin or matt paint. When dry I taped off the rectangle where the logo will come.
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| Sprayed white and tape in place |
Next I sprayed the rest of the tank in Tamiya "French Blue" as it came close to the color of the Jouef tankers and the name sounded just right ;-)
Unfortunately the paint reacted somehow to the white gloss paint but only on a specific place; the edge of the side that can be opened. I don't know what caused the paint to react like this on this specific spot but the damaged paint looked terrible.
After the paint wa dry I carefully sanded the damaged spots, applied some filler and sanded again with fine Tamiya sanding papers. Than sprayed again.
This did not restore it as much as I first hoped for. Than some fellow modellers pointed out that it looked very much as rust spots painted over. It was not too bad, some weathering would even make it look realistic...
The white rectangle looked very sharp and nice. The blue paint did bleed a bit through the tape but this could easily be fixed wit some white gloss paint applied with a small brush.
Decals
But all that work was pretty rewarding and this is how it
looks afterwards:
Next I printed it a few times in different sizes to see how
it looks like:
After chosen the right sizes (some big for the sides, a
smaller for the topside) I printed the signs on a piece of Testors transparent
decal paper. After printing I let it dry for 30 minutes and than I sprayed
varnish over the decals to seal the not waterproof printer ink so it's not
washed away when the decal gets in the water. Using varnish to seal the decals is much cheaper than to buy
waterproof ink.
The decals were printed on a simple inkjet printer (Lexmark Z617 in 2010).
One of the top sides also has a Margnat logo. This side was actually a sort of lid that could be removed. This made it very easy to work with. First sprayed in gloss white, than the circle where the logo would come was covered with a cheap plastic cup in just the right size and sprayed in blue. Next step was to apply the decal as described above.
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| Plastic cup for masking |
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| Logo in place |
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| Putting the parts together |
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| Underside was painted in matt colors |
After putting the car back together it was weathered using mainly thinned oil paints (the artist type oil paints in tubes). Actually it looked already very nice as you can see on the pictures below. I could have stopped now but I decided to place a brakeman's cabin and a platform above the tank on it, so... on to part II.
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