A Brace of Budds

chris m01

chris m01

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At long last my brace of Santa Fe Budds are ok to go.
Why a brace? - well one is an RDC1 and one an RDC3.
Why at long last? Well Aristo have done soemthing which I find a bit strange. The Aristo Santa Fe RDC 1 was made with two red end cabs and looked very smart too. Aristo have decided to build the RDC3 with one red cab and one silver cab. Now in a way this is more accurate as the Santa Fe only ever owned two Budd railcars, they always ran as a pair and had red cabs at the end but silver cabs in the middle. The Santa Fe pair began life as two RDC1s, but after a rather nasty accident they had to be rebuilt and one became a Santa Fe version of an RDC2 - not an RDC3.
Just to add further disappointment the red cab on the RDC3 was nothing like the red on the RDC1. Now I knew that I wanted to be able to run these as two single units or as a pair and so I needed both units to have red cabs at each end and I wanted the reds to be pretty much the same.

These photos show them runnig as a rather odd pair.
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So after much thinking I took a brave pill and decided to repaint the two cabs on the new one into a red which was similar to the RDC1. My first attempt was something of a disaster I used a Humbrol paint which was nothing like the colour suggested on the top of the tin so I had to strip the lot and start again. I then used a Halfords spray can and got a result which was acceptable.
The came the decals. I took a photo of the RDC1 logo and then spent ages editing it. I sent this to the guy who offered to do decals on here. This did not go well. I gave the wrong dimensions but also the spacing of the words SANTA FE was not done right. Even worse, the decal had to go on a darkish colour so he gave me some white decals to put on first. Sounds like a good idea but the white decals let the under colour come through. The logo looked like this
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They do look nice running in pairs Chris and i like the Santa Fe with it's red cabs :thumbup:
I don't think the Rio Grande ever had any shame as wifey liked Davids B&M running on Saturday could be one to go on my shopping list in the future :bigsmile:
 
At least I now had an idea of what to do. I painted the area that the decal would cover on the cab front white, printed a water sldie decal, varnished it and then applied it. The job isn't a sneat as I would like it to be but from normal viewing distance it is fine. I have my Brace of Budds in use and I'm happy. Maybe I might try to do a better job next winter.

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So I got there in the end and have the satisfaction of doing a bit of my own work. Still think the decision by Aristo to do one cab silver and one red was a bit odd.

And I wouldn't try these bad boys on R1 curves :bigsmile:
 
Very nice job! I think I'd have gone for the easier job of painting a second cab silver. Your solution for the transfers seems to have been pretty effective. It's difficult to get a good result without using an ALPS printer which uses denser water proof inks (and can do metallic and white) or professional screen printed transfers. I think your homebrew ones stand up to scrutiny so good work :)
 
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