Entry posted by D869
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After being on the back burner for a while to make way for the completion of D604 and work on the next signal for St Ruth, I finally got round to doing some more on the Ultima Hawksworth BCK that I started in October.
The coach is now ready for the paint shop (I just corrected a typo there - 'pain shop' - quite appropriate really). Although the coach is ready, I don't think it will be going near any paint for a little while - it's too flippin' cold and dark out there.
For the most part, the coach went together in much the same way as the BG did last year. The main differences arise from the fact that this coach is passenger carrying, which means bigger windows to expose the presence or absence of an interior, seats and loos.
As with the BG, I've made the roof removeable and added some nickel silver strips as strengtheners towards the top of the sides. Predictably, this complicates the interior a little but I did at least think ahead and located the centre strip in the area of the division between first and third class.
The interiors are built up on a false floor of 30 thou black plastikard. I used the printed partitions from the kit pretty much as intended (barring some alterations to fit around the strengtheners), stuck together with canopy glue. I added some seats by stealing DavidK71's idea of using coloured paper. Naturally, I had to agonise over the colour for a long time before actually starting though.
As far as I can tell the Hawksworth seats had a woven pattern - fawn on a red background for non smoking and on a dark blue background for smoking. The pattern for first class was much larger than the third class one. Having said that, other photos show Hawksworth coaches with a completely different material so it seems that there were at least two types, possibly related to the use of either wood or formica for the internal panelling.
The third class seats are a dark brown card (from a cheese biscuits box). These are coloured by lightly going over them with felt tips. The pattern is too small to be visible, so I didn't bother. The first class seats use a lighter coloured paper from a buff envelope. These are coloured with felt tips with some attempt to suggest a visible pattern. I think the blue works OK but the red is a bit too light and bright for my liking. The good thing about having a removeable roof is that I can change things if I don't like how they look once the windows and curtains are fitted.
The loo tanks have been discussed on DavidK71's thread. Checking photos supports the view that the fillers are very much off centre with respect to the tanks. Actually the fillers seem to be on the roof centre line (presumably because that's the highest point otherwise the water would fall out) so perhaps it's more accurate to say that the tanks are very much off centre. The etches in the kit don't have the filler sufficiently off centre, so I made the tanks from 10 thou plastikard… stuck them on… realised the next day that they were on the wrong side… sliced them off, sanded everything down and did it right the second time. The filler is 1.5mm round section fitted into a hole drilled through the tank and roof.
My original plan was to do the loo filler pipes using wire which would be held in holes drilled into the plastic rod used for the filler. I made a start like this but found it was very tricky to get the pipe runs to stay parallel and generally not look messy. I was contemplating how to secure them to the roof ends (as per the prototype) - ideally I wanted to fix them using a sort of mini handrail knob in a drilled hole but I realised that it was going to be tricky to fit these given that there was no room to do any gluing on the underside of the roof because the coach ends were in the way.
In the end I went for DavidK71's dodge and used 10 thou styrene rod. This gave a much neater result and I was so impressed that I extended the same approach onto the coach ends. The result looks a little more two dimensional than wire would but it's a darned sight easier to do a neat job and it also means that the two filler pipes can indeed be separate instead of being one continuous semicircle.
I dropped the idea of sprung gangways but after agonising again over the Ultima castings I decided to stick with making my own from black plastikard. Once again these fit into holes cut in the end. Since the BCK can run on its own, at the end of or in the middle of a rake, I wanted to have some options regarding gangway position so at the back of the gangway is a brass wire retaining pin that locates into one of two holes drilled in the floor to allow the gangways to be sloped in the clipped back position or held vertical if being coupled in a rake.
At the moment my plan is to put together another Ultima Hawksworth so that the two can be painted at the same time. As a first step, the Siphon G has now given up its (incorrect) long spring bogies and has been fitted with a pair of the NPCS variety built from my etches. Here's a photo of it next to the Siphon that I built many years ago with scratchbuilt sideframe overlays onto a 2mm Association bogie frame.
Finally a view of my entire Hawksworth fleet... excepting the stuff in the gloat box of course.
EDIT: A photo of a Collett roof at Buckfastleigh related to my answer to DavidK71's comment
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