While mulling over the top feed issue, the tender issue, and summoning up the courage to start drilling holes in the spectacle plate - and above all because the laser cut plasticard side frames had arrived from Ultrascale - I have decided to make some progress with the chassis.

Stripping the chassis was not as traumatic as I feared and the wheelsets, coupling rods, and cross heads gently slipped out of the chassis into a heap on the floor.

The sandboxes were removed too, as was a small bit of rectangular plastic next to one of the sandboxes. I haven't a clue what this bit of plastic represents but it will be glued onto the Ultrascale frames along with the sandboxes in due course. Then the Ultrascale false side frames were offered up to see if they fitted (they did).

The Ultrascale frames had the brake hangers (the tiny little point of metal on the Hornby chassis) marked off and holes drilled.

The brake hangers were added using brass lace pins.

Those little bits of metal representing the brake hangers were snipped off.

The Hornby chassis then had pads of 40thou plasticard superglued to it, to give something to glue the side frames to and get them out to a more respectable distance (the article in MRJ 216 was a great help at this point). The Hornby chassis is 12mm wide, the Ultrascale frames 20 thou/0.5mm each and with a 40 thou sapcer on each side gives an overall wdith of 15mm. Or put it another way, 1.5mm of sideplay (0.75mm each side) on the standard EM bakc to back measure of 16.5mm. Hopefully this will be enough...

Then the side frames were glued to the spacing pads using plasticweld.

And thats as far as I've got. Time spent on the conversion so far: an hour on the body, 3 hours on the chassis, about 6 months plucking up courage to start....

D