Wireless Set No. 52 Canadian - Project

[David Dunlop]

Bob raised a couple of interesting points last week regarding the use of stencils and to be on the safe side, I decided to double check both factors before proceeding further with work on the tool box.

The first potential problem was the use of rubber cement on flat paint, or even semi flat paints.

Years ago I restored a pair of M38 CDN’s and painted them both the original semigloss factory green. I was lucky at the time a company called Rondex here in Winnipeg, still had the original paint sample catalogs for Dulux paints and it covered all the Canadian Military Vehicle colours from the factory new M-Series back to 1944-45. When it came time to apply the CFR Numbers I used stencils mounted to the vehicle with rubber cement with no problem at all, but the paint in question was an enamel semi-gloss. Today, the term ‘semi-gloss’ seems to have disappeared from paint terminology, being replaced with names like ‘Eggshell’ or ‘Satin’, and most paints today are latex or other water-based variations.

So my first test last week was to coat a small piece of oil board with rubber cement and stick it to the bottom of the tool box, wait five minutes, peel it off, let the cement dry completely and rub it off to see what happens. As per the first three photos, the solvents for the rubber cement did not alter the finish on the satin latex paint at all. Good to know.

The second point Bob mentioned was the use of those small foam paint brushes to apply the stencil paint. Debbie happened to have quite a selection of these in her crafting supplies so I borrowed one of the small, black rectangular ones with the chisel tip to test it out.

The last photo shows the results of this test in the lower left corner after the stencil had been glued down with rubber cement and the excess cement cleaned off prior to painting. Directly above that test is the sample done with the 3/8-inch stencil brush on the same glued down oil board and off to the right the same brush on an unsecured oil board. After looking at the results for a bit, my quality ranking would be the top left result with the small stencil brush is best, followed pretty closely by the foam brush below it and a distant last place is the unsecured stencil and small brush to the right side.

I think the problem with the foam brush test is more a factor of the small size of the stencil cutouts, rather than the foam brush. With the narrow openings of the characters, too much of the foam is on top of the stencil and the foam has difficulty getting in close to the edges. As a result, the sections of some of the characters have varying widths to them. With the small stencil brush, some of the bristles clearly hit the face of the stencil, but not enough that they still flex and allow the other bristles to reach down inside the cut-outs and fill it more evenly with paint.

I think with larger sized stencils, a foam brush could easily hold its own with a bristle brush for stencil work.

So with that out of the way, and thanks again Bob for raising these points, the next step will be to apply the required stencil to the tool box.


David

[David Dunlop]

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

[Bob Carriere]

Hi David

I would have concerns using any kind of air brush as it might lift the stencil ever so much.....

The stencils I have seen that were used repeatedly were made of cut out brass sheets and very rigid....... and they used a roller ( in Black) and the dabbing brush was a well worn caked short hair thing that had turned into a felt like glob of semi dried paint....... worked well on wooden crates going up North.

Crates had the lettering over painted white and reused.......

This was done in a wharehouse and in some cases the trucks were idling at the dock to be loaded.....

Your tool box is really well done........ not sure they would have been all done so neatly in a shipping department........ reminds me of all the highly visible spot welds done on CMP bodies..... if it was solid it got shipped.

Love to follow all your hard work!!!!

Cheers

[Jordan Baker]

See the following link for a few period photos of how markings could be applied.

http://www.questmasters.us/Restoration_Supplies.html

The 4 sections aerials reel looks to have been sprayed.

There is also what’s called rocker mount stamps. Once the stamp is made, the application goes very fast.

[Alex van de Wetering]

David,

Nicely done and thanks for sharing your experiences here!

I guess if you have trouble with the cardboard lifting from the surface due to the moisture from the paint or air flow from the paint gun...you could try thin plastic sheet or sticker material in stead. I presume the stencil should not have any trouble cutting this.

Originally Posted by Bob Carriere

Hi David
The stencils I have seen that were used repeatedly were made of cut out brass sheets and very rigid.......

I have a set of those....it has individual letters in brass with a small ridge along the edges, that allows you to, sort of, link multiple letters into words. Presemably mine are post-war Dutch or German army.


The website that Jordan posted gives some nice pictures of the different applying methods used in period.....and also shows why lettering on original items is not always properly centred, straight ....and sometimes with paint smudges. Something we try to avoid as restorers!
What I do always find annoying with these stencil suppliers is that they seem to spend no energy at all at getting the font right! This website even shows a comparison of first aid boxes and it clearly shows the text is the same, but the font is wrong.

If you are using pre-made original stencils, or a stencil machine like David is using, you'll find that the width of gaps in the material is usually equal, I mean the font is specifically designed for stencilling, avoiding narrow grooves where paint can't properly run through. Some of these custom stencil suppliers however use computer fonts which are designed for book print or even web-use, designed along different guidelines, for instance to make them easier to read. As most of these suppliers will sell you stencils cut in sticker material, which seems to work very good for applying markings on vehicles by the way......why not use the proper font in stead? The cutting plotter wouldn't mind!

[Bruce MacMillan]

I have a 1/2" set of brass stencils which work well. They don't tear or warp.
They are available in other sizes and I've seen some on the auction place.
I used an airbrush and stencils cleaned up with spirits (using enamel).

[David Dunlop]

After starting at the tool box for a few days, I decided to focus on the half dozen or so really bad characters for some careful touch up work and leave the rest as they ended up.

With that all done, I now feel a lot better about the over all look of this stencil. I think the biggest improvement is in the second line “ZA Number” where all the zeros are finally consistent in appearance. The same for the letters D, W, S and B.

As far as markings on this box go now, the only thing left to sort out is the size of the C-Broad Arrow Stamp on the right side of the lid from a surviving example in a photograph of a 52-Set wooden case and the one on my Aerial Reel, the colour of choice seems to have been black. The reel shows a 1/4-inch stamp but the wooden case could either be 1/4-inch or 1/2-inch. Time will tell I guess.

Thanks for all the posts on wartime military markings. Clearly quite a variety of methods were used. It boggles the mind really!


David

[David Dunlop]

General Motors of Canada was struggling to get the newly developed C15TA Armoured Truck delivered to the Canadian Army about the same time as Canadian Marconi was working on initial deliveries of the Wireless Set No. 52. There was no hope of getting an Installation Kit developed for the 52-Set into the C15TA, which was replacing the White Scout Car FFW, so the Canadian Army developed a set of Field Installation Instructions for fitting pairs of the 52-Set and the 19-Set HP into the C15TA from metal stocks available in workshops overseas. These instructions were developed early on in the 52-Set production run and it was surprising to notice that the Lift the Dot fasteners used across the top of the Curtains, Waterproof on the 52-Set were nickel plated, not Matt Black as I suspected they would be.

The first photo today shows these nickel plated fasteners clearly on the right half of the curtain, the one dead centre below the Coil, Aerial Tuning in particular. Somewhere, I have another photo showing quite a bit of reflection off all five of these fasteners but cannot find it at the moment. The price I pay for having several thousand photos scattered across three computers, two large memory sticks, a digital camera and two camera memory cards. Consolidation is ongoing but nowhere near complete.

In any event, the nickel plated hardware did not make much sense, and I wondered if the name change in production from Curtain, Waterproof to Covers, Waterproof might have been done when CMC realized the mistake in hardware and switched production to Matt black. I got in touch with known 52-Set owners in Canada to see if they had these canvas items and asked for photos of the front markings and hardware to see what might turn up. Only three survivors so far, all the early marked ‘Curtain’ issue. Two down in Southern Ontario both have nickel plated fasteners. What was really interesting, however, was a third original curtain showed up in Alberta with Matt Black fasteners. So it may turn out that if any Covers have survived, they should all be equipped with Matt black fasteners.

I will let you know what turns up.



David