Thursday 18 September 2014

A bit of Gilbarco's finest...

Just a quick update on the fuel pump.

A very careful coat of self-etch primer for the brass, followed by a completely pointless attempt at spraying with Vallejo acrylics.  You have to thin the paint so much, it just goes on like water and does much the same, pools, runs and doesn't cover.   So I left it to dry and put a couple more very thin coats on the main body, with the gauge face all masked up.
I'd already used Maskol as a resist to the paint and to give a slightly curly edge to the peeling paint on the front panel.  Not too much, just enough for a suggestion of wear, rather than neglect, but not being able to spray it with any success as I had no enamel or cellulose the right colour, I actually used gouache paint!  As it went on it caused a few tiny bobbly bits for some reason, but since it was supposed to represent a hand painted pump, often and carelessly, the poor finish actually looked fine.
The hose was made from nickel silver wire with care to make it look like a naturally coiled stiff pipe. The nozzle is a piece of tube pushed on and flattened in the vice.  The holster is one of the etchings I had done.  At the other end of the pipe is the flow meter that pumps used to have. A kind of clear cylinder with a barber's pole spinning round inside, is done with brass rods and soldered up.

All that remains is to make the switch that turns the delivery on, the other side and either a globe or a suggestion of where the globe once was, I haven't decided yet.
The dial was hand painted, including the Gilbarco logo with a VERY fine brush and just visible behind the clear glazed face.

This pump will be for DERV, but heaven help the attendant who pumps that muck into the Jaguar XJ13!
That was the first of my small range of 1/43rd scale model car kits and is now an astonishing 28 years old!!  No wonder the epoxy headlights have yellowed a bit and the wiper's gone missing.

2 comments:

  1. A lovely job, Martin. The car is very fine, too. 28 years...that's the trouble with being and old model maker like me and thee...I find things that I have made "a couple of years ago" and realise it's more like 25 :-( ...creak...

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  2. That Jag had to be as detailed a kit as I could make it, Iain, as i was new to a then very crowded market. I was gratified to get a 5 star rating in Four Small Wheels magazine. Sold hundreds of them too, including to Norman Dewis, the test driver who was the only man allowed to drive it. I should have put an "ordinary" car by the pump, but we can't find the key to the show case the others are in! The office building is almost the same age! Frightening, innit!

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