One detail that isn't visible in this picture is the brake chain. I actually purchased a pre-blackened chain and I plan to install that after painting as to keep it's detail crisp (it should be visible dropping down from the brank handwheel to under the tank).
Oops! The picture is a little blurry because I wasn't in the best of lighting conditions at the time. Enough of it's visible for you to get the idea of what it looks like.
One of the interesting things about the PBL kit is the choice to do optional things. The ladders, platform, and tank straps (not pictured) are all optional. I did the former 2 and left off the latter, which according to the documentation is an extremely rare combination.
If you were wondering, the brass pipes coming out of the bottom are part of a holding/painting jig I made for the car.
The jig was literally made from scraps I had lying around. 1x2 firing strips cut into 4 parts. Two parts were glued together and drilled with a 5/32 bit to make holes the brass tubes could slide into. The screws for the trucks poke into the tubes. No beauty contest here, clearly, but it works and it took all of 5 minutes to make.
I realized after the fact that I could have used a slightly larger brass tube which the bolster would have completely fit into. I might drill a 2nd set of holes if I happen to find any brass tube large enough in a scrap pile somewhere.
Not pictured are the trucks and wheels. By the time I took the pictures the trucks had already received their base coat of paint. One thing I just cannot get over is the detail level PBL puts into their kits. Another blurry picture, but look at the writing that would have been cast into the wheel about the builder. Amazing!
I had mentioned a month or two ago my "normal" kit assembly area is no more and I have been using small sets of tools to do hobby activities around the house. I've had enough time to start improving on this process and here's what I've ended up with.
I'm sure you, like me, have accumulated a number of hobby hand tools and their usefulness can very widely. It's interesting to me to see what tools I end up with actually being very useful and which ones aren't.
Part of this process has been going to Walmart and buying a handful of inexpensive (88 cents!) plastic shoe boxes, then making "tool boxes" for specific activities. Right now I have three "tool boxes", one for track laying, tree making, and kit building.
Here's what has ended up in my "kit building" tool box. Everything in this box I've actually used in the last 2 weeks.
The pouch in the top left is a Xuron TK2100 Field Service Kit. This was a more recent purchase and by far the best tool kit I have for doing modeling work. It includes precision shears (aka sprue nippers), scissors, and flat head, non-textured needle nose pliers. The pliers have replaced a number of tweezers I have as I find them much easier to use for tasks I would have used tweezers for. Speaking of tweezers, the canvas pouch has pockets for two other small tools and you can see I have stuck a small pair of tweezers into it.
Below the pouch is a small OLFA 6"x8" cutting mat. This is one of those cases were less is more. The small size makes it so much easier to work with. When building plastic models a huge 3 ft by 2 ft mat is just not needed.
To the right of the mat are 2 or 3 small ziploc bags. I find these helpful for sorting model parts once I start a kit.
Below the bag are three drill bit holders and a small screw driver. Above those is a larger drill bit pouch and above that a smaller drill bit case. Micromark actually offers both of these as a set, giving a range of bit sizes 41-80, which should cover just about any need you might have in scales 1:48 and below.
Off to the far right are three files, two flats and one triangle. The differences in the flats is one has teeth on the side of the file and the other one doesn't. This allows me to pick the file based on if I need to avoid cutting things next to what I'm filing or not.
Above the files are three paint brushes. The dark green brush is used for applying plastic cement. To the left of those is one pick, hobby knife, and extremely small brush. Moving left still are a small bag of rubber bands. These are useful for holding larger things during glue drying.
All that's left are the glues. The tap in the middle is Tamiya 30mm modeler's masking tape. It's useful for misc things. Above that are a small bottle of krazy glue (ACC) and hypo-gypsum cement. These have their uses in gluing things other than plastic to plastic, like metal hand grabs for example.
The Testor's glue has white foam around it. This is because those things are extremely easy to knock over. Sticking out of the foam is a toothpick. These always seem to be very hard to find when you want them, so it's much easier to just stick it in the foam and always know where it is!
During the course of this kit I switched from Testor's plastic liquid cement to Tamiya's "extra thin" variation.
The Tamiya works far better and the brush that's included with the bottle is small enough to actually use (amazing!). This cement leaves less of a residue as it actually is extremely thin. The one problem with this cement is the smell. During the winter (when windows are closed), it will fill the entire floor with it's smell within a few minutes, and that smell will linger for several hours.
All these tools fit into the plastic shoebox "tool box" once I'm done for the day. This is a nice way to stay organized and keep hobby parts from getting scattered all over the place. You can see towards the top of the box is a white tray. This has most of hand tools in it. The plastic container on the bottom is my next victim, a PBL Southern Pacific Boxcar Type I kit.
There are always a few items that never fit however: the instructions and my magnifying glasses.
Those just end up getting set on top of the box once everything else is cleaned up.
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