Last night has seen more progress on the D95s,

First up was the fitting of drop lights to the LH coach. I have gone for a lot of part open windows, given that I know the summer of 1947 had at least one very hot spell (based on the historical reports), I figured that passengers would have kept the windows open to try and keep cool.

As per the work on the H33 these were super glued in position, cutting the etch in half where necessary to provide clearance for the door handle holes. For this I would apply a small dab of glue, before holding in place and checking alignment. Once clear more glue would be applied around the edge, which would be drawn under the etch before pressing down. Once dry, any surplus glue was removed from the top of the etch (where it would interfere with the fit to the plastic side) with a file.

Fortunately the older RH kit has the droplights half etched in place, so no fitting needed here!

Next was a start on preparing the coach for the sides. Starting with the LH coach I carved the plastic away from the van windows, ensuring enough was removed to clear the droplight. I repeated the process on the outermost compartment sides. The interior and chassis was then refitted and a sharp knife was used to cut through along the bottom and top of the windows (removing the whole thing in one chunk. The interior gives a bit more resistance to press against while cutting. Finally with a course file, clearance was filed above and below each door window to clear the droplight.

This process was then repeated for the RH coach (although without the additional work providing clearance for the droplights).

The final step for last night was to glue the sides to the body with Evostick. Given that the side has a lot less strength than the restaurant, I opted to leave the interior in place while I stuck the sides on. For some reason the bond wasn’t quite so good on the ends as with the H33. This was in part due to the tumblehome being in a slightly different position to the model on one etch, and probably part as a result of leaving the interior in place. This was resolved by running a lot of superglue into the gap. For the other side I am planning to revert to my original method, allowing greater pressure to be applied to force the side and coach together.

This morning I had enough time to file down one of the ends, which worked really well (taking care not to touch the plastic.) So tonight when I get home the first job will be to repeat the process on the other 3 ends, before getting on with fitting the other side.