Painting and weathering plastic parts

I wanted to rest a little bit of laying tracks, mounting electronics, wires, soldering, ... so I began some tests to decorate a short piece of track: ballasting and painting plastic parts like poles, relay boxes and cable trunking mostly, and I also tried to create a concrete wall from a styrene sheet.

I tried to apply some painting techniques used in large scale modeling, mostly in tank or airplane modelling, to make plastic parts less "plastic" and more realistic. The result is good to the eye, but taking close shots with the camera it shows it's necessary to work with magnifier and thinner brushes if you want similar results.

Here you can see poles just painted using an airbrush (gray and green shadows for the pole) and with a normal brush for the small parts (metallic and white). Previously I painted them with black primmer in spray can:

And here poles weathered. First I tried to eliminate brightness with gray pigment, and later I applied some rust effects to the metallic parts:

Relay box has also been painted, black ink wash, and dry brushed in a lighter gray tone.

The power of the paper clip!!

As I wrote in pasts posts, I don't use Uhlenbrock servos any more. They come complete with all accessories like servo mount (but it's weak) and piano wires to use as axles (but also weak and thin). But on the other hand servo is bigger than others and all the kit is logically expensive.
Como escribia en posts pasados, ya no uso los servos de Uhlenbrock. Vienen muy completos con todos los accesorios como la escuadra de fijación (aunque es muy débil) y los alambres (aunque también son muy débiles y finos). Pero por otro lado el servo es de mayor tamaño que otras marcas y al ser un kit es lógicamente mas caro.

When you buy servos they come with different plastic arms, but no piano wires. I was frustrated at home after visiting the nearest shops without success, and thinking where to buy that kind of wires while I has playing with a paperclip between my fingers and bending it.
Cuando compras los servos sueltos traen distintos brazos pero ningún alambre. Estaba en casa frustado después de visitar las tiendas mas cercanas sin encontrarlos, y pensando dónde podría comprarlos mientras jugaba con un clip entre los dedos e iba doblándolo.

It's a stupid discovery, but I mounted four servos using small paperclips as the axle and they work nice. It's easy to bend but strong enough to move switches. This clips also fit better in Peco's switch holes.
Es un descubrimiento bastante estúpido, pero monté los servos usando estos pequeños clips de papel como eje para el desvío y funcionan estupéndamente. Son fáciles de doblar pero resistentes para mover los desvios. Y el grosor de los clips es mas adecuado para los agujeros de los desvios Peco.


So now I have the cheapest and best solution: servo control from Peter Ghiling, servos on ebay, servo mounts in Hobby King and paper clips from the stationery.
Ahora tengo la mejor y mas barata solución: módulo de control de servos de Peter Ghiling, servos de ebay, bastidores de Hobby King y clips de la papelería.

Servos and Servo mount

In the same way I decided not to use any more digital modules from Uhlenbrock (I found better and cheaper do-it-yourself ones), I also decided to find a cheap and better solutions for servos.

I bought a bounch of 6 servo to Chine via ebay: 6 Tower Pro 9G for 16$ including shipping. But I needed also servo holders to fix servos under the desk in a firmly way and without glue to change them easily if necessary. After some time sufing ebay and the web in general, I bought the following 10 servo mounts in Hobby King for a total ammount of 25$:




These servo mount are stronger than the two L shaped tiny squares delivered with Uhlenbrock servos:

It comes with two allen screws, and holes of the servo mount are also screwed so servo is attached really well. Uhlenbrock screws must be screwed to the servo because square holes are not screwed and that kind of fixing to the plastic is weak.

That's my cheaper and best solution found, hope you like it!!!