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Old 24-10-22, 20:33
David Dunlop David Dunlop is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Posts: 3,384
Default BOXES, Tool, No. 1 Cdn No. 52 ZA/CAN 4727

I applied the stencil to the tool box this morning and I personally think it is the worst bit of restoration work I have ever done!

The tool box was on its back on a thick towel on the bench and I applied a good amount of rubber cement to the stencil before correctly aligning it down on the front of the box. I then placed a heavy steel plate weight over the top and let it sit for half an hour at room temperature.

After removing the weight and carefully rubbing away all the rubber cement that had to go, to get a clean working surface, I started the slow stencil brushing process with the 3/8-inch stencil brush. I even held down suspected problem areas on a few characters with the head of a 4-inch common nail to be on the safe side and made sure the paint was built up of several thin layers, rather than one or two heavier coats.

After half an hour for the paint on the stencil to dry to the touch I carefully removed the stencil and cleaned it up. An hour pater I carefully rubbed off any dried excess rubber cement. Of 51 characters on the stencil, 20 require touch up work, and of those, six need it badly. I will worry about that next weekend to let the white stencil paint fully cure.

On the bright side, I have an entire winter looming ahead with lots of free indoor time available to tidy this up. I still have a package of large pink rubber pencil erasers left over from restoring the damaged original decals on the 52-Set Sender panel. They should work just as well for this task, along with the same set of ultra fine tip paint brushes.

I also took some time this morning to have a much closer look at the original stencil on my 4-Section Aerial Reel. There is not a trace of a brush mark anywhere on any of the letters, or any form of screening for that matter. What I did see, however, was an ever so slight ‘ghosting’ of paint along the bottom edges of the lower two lines of the stencil.

Bruce raised a good point the other day regarding the Stencil Station on the Production Line. They would be getting a lot of items through that station daily and it would be a bottleneck in no time working stencils by hand with any sized stencil brush, regardless of staff compliment. Canadian Marconi could certainly have used air guns at this station, but that seems like overkill. Air guns in paint work are at their best for large volumes of paint over large areas quickly and pack a fair bit of air pressure behind them. They would be wasting a lot of paint using them for stencils. Stencils are much more detail oriented. I don’t know why it never crossed my mind earlier, but perhaps this station on the line was using Air Brushes. Air brushing was a very common function in the photographic sector prior to the computer age and that spun into all sorts of publication work. Air brushes were also common for a lot of detailing in paint shops in many sectors. The Cabinetry Division at CMC probably had them on hand for fancy detail work and they operate well at pressures far lower than what is needed for a common air gun. With an air brush at a stencil station, an operator could easily master holding the stencil in a jig by hand and work an air brush at the right distance and correct paint load to get little or no under spray behind the stencils, and with that equipment you would have much greater throughput for the line.

Maybe I will dust off my Air Brush and try it out when I get to working on the Spare Parts Boxes and see how it works. Assuming senility does not take hold in the meantime.


David
Attached Thumbnails
WS No. 52 Cdn. Box, Tools AZ5.JPG  
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