Let's see your scratch-built tinplate models

Thanks for your positive feedback and for the "Like"s from other fellow forum members. I'm just experimenting with different techniques and hopefully the above photos inspire other forum members to try themselves something similar. What I like most are the fake rivets on the printed coating just to fool the rivet counters by creating false 3D effects. The next step in this project right after summer break will be to figure out how to build the underframe with mounted 6-wheel trucks and hi-rail couplers. I will report later about the progress of this and of further tinplate projects.

These projects look great! 

Jeff C

Thanks, Jeff.

Is someone else doing scratch tinplate?

Just wondering...

 Not yet, but sheet metal work itself seldom goes a year without me building something, so it is inevitable.

I just have too many other projects to "clean up" first.

Are you printing directly on metal, or on something else applied to the metal?'

 Closest I've come to a tin build, is a Marx Commodore Vanderbilt to Crusader bash with .040" (1.02mm) mirror stainless. Talk about a "hard" metal to work with, drill bits dull themselves looking at it. I bent up (ruined) a small metal brakes clamp edges with it too   

It still needs some finishing parts added, and freshened paint.

 Here, Bruno is seriously guarding it from the Swiss Bandogg, named "Puppy". He likes watching my trains with me from atop his ottoman.

I print with inkjet either on glossy/matte adhesive paper or on adhesive vinyl sheet.

Then I clean the sheetmetal surface from greasy fingerprints or dust or other disturbing microscopic  microbes.

Then I attach the colorful adhesive printout onto the clinical clean thin sheetmetal by avoiding bubbles between surface and coating material.

Then I cut carefully the outlined 2D shape either with scisors or with a sheetmetal cutter.

Finally I bend the 3D bodyshell of a B-unit.

Are your projects O scale or Standard Gauge?

Jeff C

All projects in O gauge , but not exactly in scale