So… the roof is finished.
The canvas roof sheeting is made from some cigarette paper cut to a scale 3’6″ wide and glued in place with watered down cross-linking PVA and the roof vents were some old ILM ones I had hanging around in the spares drawer. The gas heater pipe on the roof evaporated because on further research, SRE2603 had electric heating and didn’t carry this feature. The overlap on the sheets is probably a tiny bit larger than it should be and there’s a few rough bits where the spray can spat, but I’d like to think a light weathering will hide all that.
There’s a real one being done on Eveleigh Work Days in a post from 2008. It is always instructive to understand the macro process you are trying to represent in the micro scale.
While we’re on the subject of representation, it’s time to face the truth about the underlying model. While it’s a good model of one of the earlier MHOs such as MHO 2609, even the most charitable beholder would be forced to concede that it is quite a poor representation of the particular prototype in question. It’s a limited-edition repaint done mainly for marketing reasons. A decision needs to be made on how to deal with that, even if the decision is to leave well enough alone. I’m going to take the middle course, based on the condition of the various parts of the model and present, if you like, what it would have been if one of the earlier MHOs was converted rather than this later example. The decision I’ve made is to fix (in both senses) the roof and floor, have a play with the interior, but leave the body pretty much in it’s current state.
The parcel area doors are the wrong type, with the wrong number of windows of the wrong shape. The bicentennial logo is on the wrong side of the guard’s doors, the lookouts are similarly reversed about the door axis and the loo is missing, so the guard has nothing to go on. We’re into diminishing returns here, while the paint colours look correct, the waves could only be said to be inspired by the original. I had enough trouble with the silly little spray cans of silver and white*, so I’m not confident enough of getting the finish close enough to replace the doors and move the other stuff around so they will be left as they are. I have another MHO in indian red that I may do that on later.
The truss rods and part of the floor on my model are broken so the upgrade was an easy decision. It isn’t much more work to do these right than to fix what’s there, so the under-floor detail will be corrected. That’s a job for later.
* I broke my airbrush and aren’t yet sufficiently convinced that I’ll be doing enough modelling to justify the expense of replacing it.
Other parts of this series:
Bicentennial MHO -part 1 – the tale of woe. A rattling parcel arrives.
Bicentennial MHO – part 2 – the power of putty. Getting the bits stuck back together.
The Reverend's Musings 
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