3D PRINT MET COACH

I ordered this set of parts - to build a Metropolitan Railway 3rd Class compartment coach - last year and have just recently gotten around to putting them together. They caught my eye whilst browsing the Shapeways site for something completely different, but then I'm a bit of sucker that way. The body, underframe and bogies, designed and sold by 'Mattwicksbluebell' via the Shapeways site, have to be ordered separately and the 3D printed parts then arrive within a couple of weeks. The body and chassis are rendered in the more forgiving WSF material, whilst the bogies are produced in the almost translucent FUD medium that is much more brittle.

It has taken many, many hours to get the parts ready for final priming and painting, with the bodyshell in particular needing lots of cleaning up and filling to get as smooth a surface as possible - a common issue with WSF. Now that extra detail fittings have been added, it's really beginning to look the part.

Metropolitan railways and rolling stock are a completely alien subject to this northerner, so I had to pop over to the NRM's Search Engine last week to do a little prototype research before the project could get started. Am looking forward to getting on with the wood grain effect paint job - something I haven't done on a panelled coach for a while...