Long before I had a blog I built a Slaters 14 ton tank wagon on which I replaced the plastic 3 part tank with one made of rolled brass. I eventually got some of the correct transfers for it and painted it like this in readiness for adding the transfers

It turned out that the transfers that I bought were of the rub down type and I couldn’t for the life of me work out how I was going to get them on over the straps and cables, so it languished on the shelf queens pile for the intervening years.

Move forward to Telford last year and Graham Beare was kind enough to loan me some of his collection of private owner wagon books and whilst browsing through them I found a photo of a Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Tar Distillation 14 ton tank wagon. I thought all my birthdays had come at once because after an appeal on the Guild site for spare Y&L transfers I had a spare set that I had planned to use on another rectangular tank at some point but thought that this would be a much better use.

Fast forward again to a few weeks ago when I was spraying the jubilee vans, I repainted the Slaters’ tank wagon into red oxide at the same time.

Then my dreams were shattered. When I referenced the photo and the transfers to the wagon itself, I quickly realised that not only were transfers physically too big for the available space on the tank, the wording was subtly different too.  So back to the drawing board and plan B (or c,d e, etc…..).

The next plan was to try to cut the letters out using the Silhouette cutter and apply them a letter at a time.

The first side took 3 sessions to get them all on and the second side took an hour to do the lot – it just flowed.

Now all I need to do is remember where I put the buffer heads and blacken them.