Saltford Peckett re-paint.

A long time ago (early nineties) I built a pair of Saltford Models Pecketts, seen here. The first one built, the red one, has always been my favourite 009 loco. The second one, the green loco, was never finished as I stalled at the painting stage. Both locos were brush painted, I didn't own an airbrush back then and never used aerosol primer either. For the green loco, the subject of this blog post, I used acrylic paint, unusual back then as most railway modellers still used enamels. Unfortunately the paint was a bit thick, and the finish poor. So I left it alone for the next twenty five plus years...

A couple of weeks ago I decided to remedy the paintwork and finish this one off once and for all. The first stage was to rub down the old paint using rubbing sticks and a fibreglass brush. Saltford locos are built as one piece, there's no seperate body and chassis, making painting rather more interesting than usual as the moving parts need to be carefully masked off, in this case with Tamiya tape and toilet paper shoved in the cab to protect the motor;

Red oxide car primer came first, for the buffer beams, which were then masked off so the rest of the loco could be squirted with grey primer;

I did have to do a bit of filling and rubbing down in a couple of places, primer is great for showing up small imperfections.
The bufferbeams could then be painted with Revel 330 'Fiery Red', which is the same as Humbrol's 'Signal Red'. I then tried to paint the roof black, firstly with Tamiya's 'Nato Black', then with Phoenix Precision's 'Dirty Black', but couldn't get a decent finish with either. So I masked of everything bar the roof and sprayed it with Hycote black primer. I would rather have used a muckier black but a poor finish on a roof would be very noticable, and I didn't want to get the airbrush out of storage (the rest of the loco is brush painted).

For the bodywork I decided to go for a blue, in this case Citadel's 'Altdorf Guard Blue' (I love the names Games Workshop use!). Frames are Phoenix Precision 'Dirty Black', ok on the footplate as there are no large flat areas to cover, and the footplates are expected to be a bit scruffy anyway. Buffers share the same pot of black, and were glued in place after painting. Testors Dullcote provides protection and tones the paint down. I couldn't decide how to finish the connecting rods, I was thinking of red as per my first loco or leaving them bare (they are whitemetal castings) but I instead chose Vallejo Model Color 'Oily Steel' despite having an aversion to metallic paint. I think I made the right choice.

I did a little bit of extra work on this loco back in the day, the cab sides and back have been reprofiled to allow for handrails to be fitted, and whitemetal springs were fitted above the front wheels. These are Chivers Finelines castings, bought from their trade stand many years ago. I also added some pipework under the saddletank, from brass wire, scraped clean of paint after finishing. Nickel silver wire was used for the handrails, and staples made good lamp brackets. I also fitted brass axle bearings and an LH17 motor instead of the cheap Mabuchi, complete with a flywheel that I turned at work, when machining payed my mortgage.

I made new flycranks for this loco, described here, but lost them and had to make two new ones. Such is life. Anyway, my two Pecketts posed together;

Unusually the con. rods are retained on the flycranks by slivers of plastic sleeve, slipped over the crankpins, and the rods slide along fixed 'pistons' which are glued into the cylinders, using split pins fitted behind where the cross head should be. Simple but surprisingly effective.

There is another one of these characterfull little kits waiting to be built...

Paul.