Hello again everyone.

In my last posting I told you how I intended to fit the roofs to those two CG brake vans, - a plug-in system that would allow the roof to be removed without damage, thus allowing access to the verandas.

Hence the title, - “The Best Laid Plans….” Well those mice & men certainly had a good go at me!

I have now got the idea to work but it cost a lot of frustration and much use of those Russian words that always seem to accompany my frustrations.

I had intended that the roofs would be 0.020” Plasticard, curved to the roof contour by fixing the sheet plastic into a curve using near boiling water poured over the styrene which would be wrapped around a suitable former. I’ve done it before, many times with success and occasionally with a bit of deformation. This time all I could achieve was the “deformation bit!!

My next attempt was to try two laminations of 0.010”, scribing lengthwise planking on both, hand-bending one with the scribing on the concave side and the other on the convex. The scribing should aid getting the curvature and the convex planking would be correct too. Laminating these two should hold the curve and all would be Hunky-Dory. It wasn’t!

Actually it was an improvement on the first try but it had a tendency to curl up at each end rather than retain a straight line, causing the roof ends to not lie where they should. This caused my mind to turn to sheet metal rather than sheet styrene and I decided on making the roofs in brass.

A strip of 0.010” was cut to size, offered to my rolling machine and then rolled to a curve of slightly smaller diameter than the roof. OOOH! I much prefer metal to plastic!

At this point I realised that part of the problem had been that I had produced circular curves and then tried fitting them to elliptical curved formers. With the brass there was no problem in tweaking the circular shape to elliptical, - simple squash it! Well, take care, but it does only involve gentle squashing pressure on the top, longitudinal centre line to achieve the required elliptical curve.

More quickly than any of the plastic attempts I had two nicely fitting brass roofs sitting loosely on their bodies. All that now remained was to araldite the brass to those inserts I talked about last time.

This however was not so simple as those words may imply. The roof had been made too long to allow for adjustment when fitting to the body, and a ‘dry run’ was used to mark how much trimming was needed. That done, how could I ensure that the araldite made contact only with the insert and not the body, while being sure that the roof would end up correctly positioned when the insert was pushed home?

This decision was that araldite would initially only be introduced to the middle of the top edge of the two inner end-formers, the insert pushed home, the roof carefully positioned, i.e. equal overhang, sides and ends, and rubber bands left to hold that position over-night while the araldite cured.

At last my ideas were starting to work! The following day I added araldite to the insert’s outer former-roof joint with the unit out of the body and all now seems good.

Just two pictures:

The roof is in place with still a bit of fettling required before acceptance but at least looking the part.

Also, the roof off its body, displaying its fixing method. On this picture you may be able to make out a red blob on the inside of one of the formers. This is colour coding to ensure the unit goes into the body the right way round.

An OOPS moment!

Writing those last few words caused me to check: the ‘roof-on’ picture shows that I forgot to check, and the roof is the wrong way round in that pic. I thought much less fettling was required than that picture implies.

Dave