At the time, the blue & grey set was produced solely as an experiment - ideally the third blue set should have been made as a blue & grey, so I decided to make one final EMU set.
It's a long-winded job. Although using the Silhouette Portrait cutter made life easier. I was able to pre-cut all the windows, cutting them slightly smaller to allow for any minor adjustments, it also made it easier to line up the vinyl before sticking it down in position. The result is that the vinyls on this unit are much straighter, even though the quality of the image is slightly different due to being printed from a new printer (some colour tweaks were needed) and the Portrait software can't do cut & paste from other applications, the images have to be saved and opened separately.
The newly printed and cut graphics are lined up against the coach side prior to assembly to ensure a good fit. A black and white draft print was done on ordinary paper to make sure that the settings were right and that all the doors & windows line up.
The graphics for the cab ends were also cut electronically, much more accurate, easier to apply...
Especially the destination boards, cut using a rounded rectangle template, these look much better than the previous attempts. I have now revisited the rest of the blue EMUs and added the same cab graphics...
And after three coats of lacquer to the sides, two coats of grey primer on the roofs and two coats of Vauxhall Mustard Yellow on the cab ends, the bodies were ready for assembly.
The wheels & bogies were cleaned and lightly oiled, years of muck scraped off the nylon plastic wheels, which should make it run smoother.
And then the whole thing is put back together...
So that's five, three car EMU sets.
That'll do.
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