Guard against trouble 2

Painting an item of rollingstock you've built can be a joy or a curse depending on the number of colours you might have to use. The Z van proved to be the later as I used no less than 5 different colours to get the result I wanted (that is 2 more than the instructions dictate):

The main body colour is 'wagon red' (using Humbrol #100), the underframe and handrails satin black (Humbrol #85), roof a sandy tan colour (Humbrol #63) window surrounds and blinds for cupola windows light grey (Humbrol #40) and finally the stove chimney metallic silver (Humbrol #11). There is a 6th paint colour I use to do the axles and wheel faces which is an old pot of Polyscale Grimy black to cover the shiny brass of the axles and the raw steel of the wheel faces.

Anyway enough of the waffle, here is the van ready to go:

Just a final thing on those window blanking plates, I gave the wrong styrene thickness in the diagram. I used Evergreen .25mm sheet and not .025" (which you can't get anyway). I'd like to build another one of these in the near future to the same spec but coded as a Z and not a ZL.