After much nagging and bullying from you know who, I spent much of the weekend and a little of yesterday evening trying out different tequniques for painting the etched sign (see previous article).
Initially, Ivan and I had got together on Thursday evening for a good old chin wag and “planning” session that rapidly turned into a making, testing and experimenting session. We started by cleaning the least successful platform “Abingdon” sign with a glassfibre pencil. After carefully cutting it from the fret and filing of the burrs, we soldered it to a couple of rail posts and glued a piece of plasticard to the back to help disguise the holes. Ivan dug out some black primer spray paint and after five minutes dancing around the garden playing samba rythms (rattling the can) he sprayed the sign matt primer black.
For the lettering, we tried the suggestion of using a roller to just add paint to the raised parts of the sign but unfortunately this was disasterously unsuccessful (though may work with some of the smaller signs). After re-applying the primer, I used a small brush to carefully paint in the lettering. It takes a very steady hand and a lot of patience to achieve good results this way and despite using Ivan’s magnifying glasses, the end result was looking very ragged with a lot of accidental slips needing to be fixed with the primer.
Over the weekend, I was able to get hold of an even smaller brush (OOO) and clean up some of the edges and cover over some of the slips. A quick rub with the glass fibre pen helped to take the shine off the lettering and a brush over with weaathering powders toned down the white and gave the whole sign an aged look.
With the smaller signs, I used a slightly different method. After painting in the background base colour with black paint, I used what is commonly called a dry-brush technique (I think !?). 
I loaded a flat and relatively wide brush with the white paint and then carefully wiped it on a piece of scrap paper until only a small amount of paint remained on the brush. This was then very lightly stoked across the signs so that only the highest parts of the lettering picked up the paint. I repeated this several times until there was enough paint built up on the letters. This method seems to have been very successful, particularly on the GW notice that will be fixed to the side of the goods office. (Incidentally, if you take a look at in the “Martin Smith” collection of photographs on our www.abingdonbranch.co.uk website, there is an excellent image of the original sign in glorious technicolour.)
