This months renovation sees KSEL embrace their inner creativity to make the carriage look its optimum.
With most of the passenger half of the carriage complete, the KSEL team began to look at how we could make the carriage interior look better. Since having the carpenter in, it became apparent that the exterior of the carriage was looking far better than that of the interior, and, with the changes made to the exterior of the carriage, the carriage was now made from varying wood colours and makes. With this, the team decided it would be best to make the carriage look whole again.
The first point of call was to sand down the wood inside the carriage to ensure that all of the old and original paint and varnish had gone before we decided to paint over it. We began by scratching the paint from the ceiling of the carriage by using a blow torch and a chisel in order to get rid of the paint that the previous owner had placed onto the roof before we could start sanding down the ceiling. After weeks of scratching off the lead paint, we began to move onto the side walls of the carriage. For this, we used the same technique for all 4 walls of the carriage until it met the desired specification.
Once all of the walls were sanded to perfection (ceiling still to be sanded) and all of the original varnish and paint was gone, we began to look into the paint that would’ve been used traditionally for the carriage to see if we could resemble anything like how it would’ve looked. If any of you have read the previous months blog, you’ll understand just how hard it is for KSEL to find a shade of wood dye or paint that would be adequate for the carriage, without making it resemble a beach hut. But, eventually, after many more weeks of trawling through paint shops, we managed to find some colours that matched what we were after.
Finally, after getting the right coloured wood paint, we began to paint the interior of the carriage. Looking at old pictures the carriage would have been lighter on the top half and a darker, more reddish brown on the bottom half of the carriage where the seats would have come to, so, we tried to recreate that.
The painting itself was not too hard to complete and was done within a couple of hours. It was the sheer fact that the paint kept dripping and merging into the other colour that made everything much more difficult, and the fact that we were unsure as to how far up the reddish part of the carriage was and how far down the lighter brown colour was as we only had one interior seat for an indication. Eventually, however, we managed to finish the interior colours of the carriage to the standard we liked, and we were able to look into adding the quirky little parts of the carriage that we took off for the carpenters renovation.
In order to replace the intricate parts of the carriage, we had to first clean and repaint them. We started with the cigarette scratch posts which we cleaned using diet coke, and repainted using a brass colour spray as to look like it would have done originally. Secondly, and we cleaned and painted the paraffin lamp holes with the same brass spray ensuring that it resembled its original look, and thirdly, we placed in the window leather strap holder.
The window leather strap holder (not sure of the technical name) is something KSEL only found recently and, once speaking to the professionals, we learnt that the strap holder would have been used to adjust the window height to either lower or higher for the customers use. We only have one of these so it is a real shame that we are unable to fit more than one to the carriage in order to recreate how it would have looked originally, but we are hoping to look for someone to recreate these in order for us to be able to place more of them on the carriage. It is the brass round, just under the window of the picture below.
From all of us at KSEL, we would just like to say a massive happy new year to all of our readers. Thank you all for taking the time to read our monthly blog updates on the carriage and for sharing and commenting on our blog posts. If you would like to follow the carriage updates and don’t want to wait a whole month for the blogs to be released, KSEL have created their own Facebook group for all of our readers to keep in touch and see what we’re getting up to. Please feel free to like our Facebook page and comment what you think.