Post by hlcx4300 on Mar 12, 2014 23:26:44 GMT -5
On the bench currently is a recently acquired KATO Union Pacific SD40 that is going through a rebuild of sorts. I got this unit, budget priced at a recent train show with an idea in mind to recreate a common prototype. I have noticed that when UP leases power, it's often units originally from them, sold off to the leaser and released back to them! With this in mind, I thought it would be neat to model one of these former UP EMD's now in the afterlife of a leaser. With prototype reference, I modified a few things on the model to match a prototype. What I thought was going to be an easy project, turned out to be a little harder then I thought. The KATO SD40's have god awful looking front plow step sets molded on to both ends of the pilots that I ended up cutting off with a motor tool. In the end, I cut them off but in the process, damaged the pilot faces beyond repair so I went back and cut them all the way up to the coupler boxes as well. I then cleaned up the areas and fabricated new pilot faces with styrene. Some more styrene fittings finished off the pilot reconstruction. I then moved to the fuel tank, I removed the connecting clips on both ends, and the fuel fillers with a sharp Xacto blade and finished off the areas with fine sandpaper and putty. I then added new vent pipes, fuel fillers, and a custom made waste retention tank to the back of the fuel tank. I then focused on stripping off the factory lettering and numbers with a bottle of MicroSol and a rubber eraser. After my hands were completely cramped, I washed off the areas with soap and water and let air dry. On the prototype, the cabsides and battery box doors are repainted a slightly darker yellow so a bottle of CSX yellow was a close match for the patching. I masked the surrounding areas off and sprayed a few coats onto the areas and let dry. At this point, I have started some very basic detailing but am holding off the majority of work until an order of parts comes in. The tricky part is trying to get an accurate UP style snowplow for the model, Athearn recently cranked a batch of UP SD40T's with a fairly accurate version of this plow so I am going to try to call them up to see if I can get a few of these plows as extra parts. That's about it for now, I will have more on this project as things progress! I will leave it up to you guys to guess and decide who this unit belongs to! ;D 
