On the Reading AS-16’s there were four rows of louvers under the engineer’s side air intake on the long hood, as seen on this detail of my brother’s drawing. These are missing on my pair of Overland AS-16’s. I’m not going to punch them in the brass sheeet and the thoght of cutting them into the sheet does not appeal to me either.

I thought this would be a good test for Archer Fine Transfers new surface details #36 O Scale 14″ Louvers and #37 O Scale 6″ Louvers. So I ordered them in last week. I have to say that they arrived a couple of days after placing the order on their website. I had ordered their rivets before but had not had a chance to use them yet.

I thought it would be a good idea to test them out before using them on the model. Even though these sheets are a little expensive there are plenty of louvers on the sheet.

They are handled just like decals but they are more fragile than decals. I soaked them in water until they released from the backing paper and then applied them to a test sheet of brass. They adheared fine, I did use Champs setting solution on them after they had dried.

For my needs for the AS-16 niether size is really correct. So I experimented with cutting the 14″ down to 8″ width. My first attempt did not work as I slide the blade down the decal. This cause the ends to chip away. I did say these details are fragile. My second attempt worked much better, I cut through the decals in a chopping motion and did not have any chipping of the detail.

Here is the test in primer. As I mentioned the left column, the 6″ louvers are spaced too far apart and are too narrow. The middle column is the 14″ louvers. They are close to the correct spacing but are too wide. The third column is the cut down 8″ column from the 14″ details. There is a hint of overlap in this image but remember column one is 1/8 of an inch wide, so they are reproduced here at about 400% of the actual size.

I like them. I’ll try them out on the Baldwins in the next couple of days.