Hot on the heels of the L1 comes the next loco project....

.... a BEC whitemetal 'Improved Director'.

This is a kit I bought late last year and for reasons I'm now starting to remember put in the 'I'll get round to it someday' pile.

Well today was that day and I'm starting to regret it, though I must say I do enjoy a challenge.

The first problem was a biggie.... the castings are buckled. The footplate I straightened out by gluing the splashers to it fore and aft and then applying pressure in the middle of the splashers using pliers. The boiler halves were the real issue; they went together nicely at the back and around the smokebox but part at the the bottom of the front and in the middle.... it took a fair amount of fettling, and I'm sorry to say some colourful language, to get them back straight-ish. They're still not quite right now.

I was able to use the boiler fittings from the kit, though I did replace the chimney with a spare casting from the L1 kit (the L1 and D10/ D11 share the same boiler diagram- I'm not entirely sure this extended to boiler fittings but the L1 casting was so much neater than the BEC example).

Overall at the moment- bleurgh. Just look at the amount of filler I've had to use to fill in the worst of the gaps.... and I've still to go back over it once the glue has dried. Oh yes, I'm gluing this together with UHU. The last time I used a soldering iron I managed to pick up the hot end....

The basic model's gone together easily enough, but I think that the experience has been enough at the moment to put me off whitemetal kits. The material strikes me as being too soft and pliable for larger castings like boilers and the fact it melts at low temperature has put me off soldering it. I think if I decide to go down the metal kit route, I'll go for brass ones.