I have had a GW rivet press sitting somewhere under my piles of stuff for quite a few months now but have only now found an excuse to play with it. Actually, the Mercian H class tank has been sitting under the same pile for even longer but started it off as something to do while my lovely wife was in the same room Googleing where I am being sent off to on holiday this year. As regular readers will know, no filing of metal or soldering is allowed to occur in the same room as her! After a bit of messing around with Alen keys I had the right combination of punches and dies in place. This ia actually an important point as I nearly bought a Metal Smith press at the O gauge Guild show last September but realised that it came with only one scale of punches and would have got expensive adding in extras. The GW comes with 2, 4 and 7mm as standard. With this kit I ended up using both the 7 and the 4mm sets so was great to have them.

I guess I am only using a fraction of the capabilities of this machine in just punching out half etched rivets but it does do it rather well. It is still not quick to do a complex etch like this but certainly beats the blisters I have inflicted on myself using scribing tools or punches.

So here it is a fully punched etch. Only thing I have to admit to though is that I didn't do it all in one go. I actually found it rather difficult to see what was going on as the punch body was obscuring the light from my modeling lamp so did most of it with lovely natural light in the conservatory the next day.

I used a Wrightlines flat wagon for the underframe rather than the etched version of the kit but was soon looking pretty complete. I just have to ad some brackets and can then get on with the rather sexy camouflage paintwork.